I was shown last week a new virtual server setup from Fasthosts. It’s pretty awesome, and it comes with Windows 2008 therefore IIS 7.0, and then you can add SQL Server 2008 Express edition for free. So basically a lovely big chunky new server for a small amount of money, less than my current server!

IIS 7.0 and MVC 2.0

Why did I do this?  Well tiny.projecttime.co.uk runs off MVC (and MVC 2.0 very soon).  MVC will run more efficiently off IIS 7.0 as with IIS 6.0 I had to wildcard requests to get them to hit the server, and this was a bit baws.  All static content therefore went through the ASP.NET worker process and was slightly slower than it should be.  IIS 7.0 promises a lot more!  And with URL Rewriting properly built in now, my CMS engine with virtual URLs all over the place will work nicely.  Shame it’s staying on my old server for the foreseeable future.

Also I will be moving this blog over, only to get nicer URLs coming out of IIS as it has the URL rewriting built in.

What is even nicer about the Fasthosts setup is you can do temporary upgrades to your machine.  So for a small amount of time, say you are doing a large sales push or a mailer going out to 1000s of people, you may need a server boost.  Well Fasthost will do it for you in the blink of an eye.

If you then find your sales push was perfect and you are now getting more and more visitors to your site, then you can ask for the upgrade to be permanent.  On dedicated servers you would have had to gone through masses of hassle to take it to the next level, not so with this little beauty.

Although at some point you will need to go dedicated, virtual servers are not the final answer, at least you have proven there is a need for the dedicated machine without spending a little fortune.

Nice.