The Situation:
Atlanta Cutlery has one week to prepare its ecommerce website – MuseumReplicas.com – for a huge burst of traffic. How huge? Their best guess is an increase of somewhere between 300% and 3000%. But the bump is only expected to last for a few days. They need a hosting solution that can be quickly deployed, is scalable in real time, and won’t require a long term contract to implement.

The Solution:
Applied Innovations implements a creative, cutting-edge solution that saves more than 70% off the cost of deploying dedicated servers. By launching a fleet of virtual web servers and hosting them on existing nodes, additional servers required no additional hardware inventory, and could be provisioned in under an hour. The solution is scalable, economical and a complete success.

The Results:
Atlanta Cutlery’s MuseumReplicase site averaged 150,000 visitors per day over the three days of the surge, and the site was actually faster than it had ever been. Product sales increased significantly, and even remained higher than normal after the burst.

Read the whole teeth-gritting, nail-biting, white-knuckle story here. Make sure you’re sitting down.

>> Download the Museum Replicas Case Study

Scale your site as your needs change

One of the biggest requests we received from Windows Server 2008 (IIS7) customers was for increased flexibility and scalability in our shared hosting plans. To meet this need, we have added two additional shared hosting plans (for a total of three) to enable customers to scale between a variety of hosting plan capacities.

Our hosting platform also enables our customers to easily move beyond shared hosting when their needs grow too large for a shared platform. Within minutes, we can move fully-active web sites from a minimal shared hosting plan to a fully managed dedicated server – with virtually no downtime. Windows Server 2008 (IIS7) has a complete set of features that helps make these rapid server migrations possible.

Integration with our control panel

Windows Server 2008 (IIS7) offers remote administration. This is a powerful new  feature that allows a non system admin to manage IIS features via the IIS Manager in a secure and granular fashion.  Customers can now enable feature delegation directly from their hosting control panel.

We created this short video to demonstrate the process:

New IIS7 modules added and accessible

We have installed and exposed a variety of IIS7 modules. Here are brief descriptions of the newly introduced IIS7 modules along with some links to our knowledge base:

IIS7 Media Pack – The IIS Media Pack 1.0 includes the Bit Rate Throttling and Web Playlists extensions for IIS7, which enable you to:

• Save bandwidth costs by throttling the speed at which content is downloaded
• Decrease network traffic by metering your media deliveries
• Monetize media assets with Web playlists that personalize content and prevent ad skipping
• Intelligently deliver multiple media formats from a single server, including .wmv, .flv, and .mp4 files

IIS7 URL Rewrite Module – The Microsoft URL Rewrite Module for IIS7 provides flexible rules-based rewrite engine that can be used to perform broad spectrum of URL manipulation tasks, including, but not limited to:

• Enabling user friendly and search engine friendly URL with dynamic web applications;
• Rewriting URL’s based on HTTP headers and server variables
• Web site content handling
• Controlling access to web site content based on URL segments or request metadata.

Failed Request Tracing - Sometimes called FREB, the request-based tracing provides a good way to figure out what exactly is happening with your requests and why, provided you can reproduce the problem you are experiencing. Problems like poor performance on some requests, or authentication related failures on other requests, or even the server 500 error from ASP or ASP.net can often be very difficult to troubleshoot–unless you have captured the trace of the problem when it occurs.

PHP Driver for SQL - The SQL Server Driver for PHP is a PHP 5 extension that provides data access to SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. The extension provides a procedural interface for accessing data in all versions (including Express) of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. The SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP API includes support for Windows Authentication, transactions, parameter binding, streaming, metadata access, and error handling

Request Filtering – IIS7 incorporates all the core features of URLScan into a module called Request Filtering and added a feature called Hidden Segments.

Database Manager – IIS Database Manager allows you to easily manage your local and remote databases from within IIS Manager. IIS Database Manager automatically discovers databases based on the Web server or application configuration and also provides the ability to connect to any database on the network.

IIS Reports – This application extends IIS7 Manager by adding a new Reports option that gives you a few reports of the server and site activity.

Reducing costs through flexibility

One of the key features of IIS7 is its ability to leverage both ASP/ASP.NET and PHP applications on the same platform. Our customers can now harness excellent performance from PHP based applications in our Windows Server 2008 (IIS7) environment, and thereby eliminate the need to deploy concurrent platforms. This helps to reduce the total cost of ownership of any Web application, and streamlines server management.

 

Microsoft is offering a FREE Hands-on IIS7 Training session with their Hosting Roadshow.  Although we’ve been working with Windows Server 2008 and IIS7 for over a year now, IIS7 represent a major change for web hosting providers world-wide and I had the opportunity to attend the training myself this week. This was without question one of the best IIS training sessions I’ve attended and I’ve been going to them since the earliest Windows 2000 training sessions.

I’d encourage anyone that manages their own dedicated server, vps server or even web developers to attend this training as there’s something there for everyone.

If you’re interested in learning more about the roadshow even click on the banner above.  This week we’ll start a weekly blog article about IIS7 and Windows Server 2008 and how it’s changing and just what to look forward to.