http://www.stronghost.co.uk purity.net for spam filtering||||24||||2009/7/17 I just want to give a shout out to purity.net for spam filtering. They make server-wide filtering a breeze by delegating the whole process on their own servers (just point MX records to their server). We spent a long time looking at various spam filtering services, including many hosted on ... http://www.stronghost.co.uk/blog.asp?date=7/17/2009&EventID=24 Redirecting non-www domain to www domain||||23||||2008/9/2 If you want people to be redirected to http://www.yourdomain.com/ when they enter http://yourdomain.com, here's how to do it in IIS:- 1. Go to IIS on the server and right click / select properties on the domain you want to do this for 2. On the Web Site tab (the one already selected), ... http://www.stronghost.co.uk/blog.asp?date=9/2/2008&EventID=23 New IIS7 Releases: URL Rewrite, Application Routing and Load Balancing, and PowerShell Cmd-lets||||22||||2008/7/24 In last a few weeks, the IIS team has released 3 IIS extensions updates: · URL Rewrite Module CTP1 · Application Request Routing CTP1 · PowerShell Provider CTP2 Full Article >>> ... http://www.stronghost.co.uk/blog.asp?date=7/24/2008&EventID=22 How to Migrate from IIS 6 to IIS 7||||21||||2008/7/23 With so many cool new capabilities in IIS7, and even more new features coming out all the time, it's no wonder you want to move to IIS7.  But you work for The Man, and everyone knows The Man wants ROI.  He can't just let you go willy-nilly and adopt every cool new technology th... http://www.stronghost.co.uk/blog.asp?date=7/23/2008&EventID=21 How to identify which websites are using up the CPU||||20||||2008/6/9 One of the biggest headaches with IIS is trying to identify which websites are the most expensive CPU-usage wise. You can do performance monitoring but all you get is each worker process (for each application pool) identified as "w3wp.exe". Hardly helpful. Well, there IS a way to identify... http://www.stronghost.co.uk/blog.asp?date=6/9/2008&EventID=20 4 problems with large-scale shared hosting||||19||||2008/2/1 1. Unreliable serviceWhen sharing a server with 500+ other websites (typical for large-scale shared hosting), you are at the mercy of all those other websites. Dodgy coding on just one of those sites can bring the whole server down, or maybe one site suddenly gets a huge traffic spike from a social... http://www.stronghost.co.uk/blog.asp?date=2/1/2008&EventID=19 Simple example of how to cache data||||17||||2008/1/11 You will want to cache parts of your website that are costly to CPU usage. For example, you might have an e-commerce website that lists its product categories down the left-hand side of every page. This list might be generated from the database every time a page is loaded on the site. Think about... http://www.stronghost.co.uk/blog.asp?date=1/11/2008&EventID=17 11 tips on reducing CPU usage on your Windows server||||16||||2008/1/8 This is far from an exhaustive list, but it should act as a good "to do" list when checking over your websites / server. Websites1. Cache everything that can be cached. This was discussed in detail in the Database-driven websites and caching article - don't render your pages via da... http://www.stronghost.co.uk/blog.asp?date=1/8/2008&EventID=16 Server Side Image Manipulation with Graphics Mill||||14||||2008/1/3 This will sound like a sponsor article, but it's really just a straight-up recommendation. For anything to do with image manipulation, if you're programming in ASP or ASP.NET, Graphics Mill is the best image processing component I've used - and I've tried a lot of other components! It's the e... http://www.stronghost.co.uk/blog.asp?date=1/3/2008&EventID=14 Upload / download limits and the IIS Metabase File||||13||||2007/12/30 Setting upload limitIf you are hosting on a Windows platform, you can alter the size limit for uploaded files via the metabase file. This is particularly useful when setting up a new server, since the default limit is just 200k. The metabase file is locked by default. You ca... http://www.stronghost.co.uk/blog.asp?date=12/30/2007&EventID=13 IIS - Every website needs its own application pool||||11||||2007/12/24 When adding websites to your server, make sure to give each one its own application pool. This effectively isolates each website from an application crash. This is good for two reasons:- If one application pool crashes, it doesn't affect the othersIt's much easier to identify the site t... http://www.stronghost.co.uk/blog.asp?date=12/24/2007&EventID=11 Hosted Anti-Spam Email Filters||||9||||2007/12/18 Spam isn't worth wasting your time on. We wasted our time trying out various anti-spam software packages for our own servers - all promising to be quick and easy to set-up. Oh yeah, apart from the 20 steps where we're setting up Active Perl, downloading nmake from Microsoft, registering the perl sc... http://www.stronghost.co.uk/blog.asp?date=12/18/2007&EventID=9 Bandwidth Monitoring and IIS||||8||||2007/12/16 Any web server should be configured to cope with large scale traffic. The amount of traffic your server receives depends on the popularity of the websites being hosted, the content they show, and how they have been developed. We wrote earlier about caching for database-driven websites to he... http://www.stronghost.co.uk/blog.asp?date=12/16/2007&EventID=8 URL Rewrites and IIS / ASP||||7||||2007/12/15 It's important to use search engine friendly URLs for your website. This aids search engines in understanding the content of your web pages. Friendly URLs and Unfriendly URLsAn unfriendly URL:- http://www.yourwebsite.com/products.asp?PageID=3422&CID=2&SKU=231444 A frien... http://www.stronghost.co.uk/blog.asp?date=12/15/2007&EventID=7 Database-driven websites and caching||||2||||2007/12/14 Database-driven websites render their web pages via web scripts (e.g. PHP, ASP) that in turn get content from a database (e.g. mySQL). These types of websites are commonly e-commerce, blog / content-managed websites - or shall we say, the vast majority of websites out there now. These ma... http://www.stronghost.co.uk/blog.asp?date=12/14/2007&EventID=2 Hosting News and Support||||1||||2007/12/14 We have just launched this new section offering help for other hosts out there who are hosting dedicated servers on a Windows platform. It's not easy starting out and feeling your way around the issues of setting up and managing a dedicated server - in the early days we learnt a lot through dealing... http://www.stronghost.co.uk/blog.asp?date=12/14/2007&EventID=1