May 2007 - Posts

• Interprise Solutions - AspDotNetStoreFront Conference

  This week we were  at the Interprise Suite and AspDotNetStoreFront Business Solutions   Conference which was held in El Segundo California.     As featured asp.net hoster and a Microsoft Gold partner our role at the event was to to educate developers on the different aspects and environments of windows hosting. A good is example is why robust e-commerce applications such as AspDotNetStoreFront will not run efficiently in a discount asp.net type hosting environment.  Oddly enough  I had a customer call a few weeks prior to the event and mention that he kept getting "kicked" out of the back-end part of his AspDotNetStoreFront Store. It didn't take me long to come up with a logical explanation as it was clear enough that this person's host was obviously capping his application.  This was being done at such a restriction that it was forced to constantly recycle.  AspDotNetStoreFront only consumes about 120 MB of RAM upon compiling on the web server but as the store's concurrent connections increase the worker process memory utilization rises and thus cases it to recycle. This is why it is important to choose a host that can grow as your e-business demand grows. There really is no necessity in migrating to a dedicated environment as there should be plenty of options for your application at the shared hosting environment. Here is a great a example and a great plan we offer. Our VS-3 account aka Advanced Hosting  or Semi-dedicated Hosting is operated under the same hardware as the rest of our hosting plans. However, we limit these server to only 25 sites. I am not trying to mislead you in the sense that when the time has come for a dedicated server you must meet those needs. This is one of the many topics we discussed regarding hosting in our keynote.  If you wish to download the full powerboat presentation, you can do so here. I also went on and spoke about IIS7 and some of it's new key features. That presentation may be found here. Here are some conference pictures:               Jess Coburn, CEO (left), and Carlos Caneja, CTO (right)-- preparing for their keynote on hosting essentials.      Jess Coburn, CEO of Appliedi.net along with Robert Anderson, CEO of AspDotNetStoreFront, and Carlos Caneja, CTO of Appliedi.net as the first day was wrapping up.     If you are an existing AspDotNetStoreFront Customer you may have spoken with the guy in the middle-- Dan Van Kuren, VP of Customer support at AspDotNetStoreFront. Posted May 28 2007, 03:13 AM by caneja with no comments Filed under: AspDotNetStoreFront

• Applied Innovations speaks at the Technology Conference for Interprise Solutions and ASPDotNetStorefront.

  Interprise Solutions and ASPDotNetStorefront invited Applied Innovation's Jess Coburn (CEO) and myself (Carlos Caneja, CTO) to speak at this event because of our lead in the Microsoft ASP.net hosting platform. Being a leader in  the ASP.net hosting environment has helped us establish these strategic partnerships.  We very much understand  how these applications run on a shared, dedicated (as well as virtual) environments. What the limitations of each scenario are and what you can do scale out. I like to say (relating to scalability) "after all, it's just a bunch of .aspx, a .mfd, and .ldf files". Mr. Jess Coburn and myself will be speaking about shared hosting, dedicated hosting, virtual private server environments, load balancing, fail over, clustering, general asp.net hosting tips and tricks, best practices, security, and scalability. This invite is not planned to be a selling rodeo about our hosting services.  Our presence has been tailored to educate you (today's developer) on the "ins" and "outs" of  the ASP.net hosting world. The event will be held May 21st - May 25th in Los Angeles, California. For more information on this event please visit the conference brochure. We hope to see you there! Posted May 20 2007, 05:07 AM by caneja with no comments

• Microsoft Windows "longhorn" gets it's offical name today as "Server 2008"

  Bill Gates annouced today that the next verion of Microsoft Windows Server (code named "LongHorn") will be Microsoft Windows Server 2008. Windows 2008 will ship in 5 different flavors. Web Edition Standard Edition Enterprise Edition Datacenter Edition Itanic Edition (designed for use with the intel Itanium-64 bit processor) A new and exiting new feature in the windows hosting community is IIS7.   More Information about  Windows Server 2008. More information about IIS 7 hosting. Posted May 15 2007, 07:18 PM by caneja with no comments

• A whole new line of "DS-X" Series.

  X is for Xeon. Applied Innovations will shortly be unveiling its new "X" series of Intel dedicated server platforms. All of the servers featuring the windows 2003 operation system will have the option to be managed. More information regarding managed dedicated hosting services can be found here: http://www.appliedi.net/dedicated-services  Here is what's to come-- Standard Line: DS-C1:     Intel® Celeron® Processor 336 at 256K Cache, 2.8GHz, 533MHz FSB.     512 MB PC3200 DDR2 533 MHZ Memory.     80GB Ultra 150 Serial ATA 7200 RPM Drive. The DS-C1 has been part of our family and has been a very successful platform for years. Perfect for a NAS or a server to develop on. DS-PDC:     Dual Core Intel® Pentium®D 915, 2x2MB Cache, 2.8GHz, 800MHz FSB.     1 GB PC3200 DDR2 533 MHz Memory.     2 X 80GB Ultra 150 Serial ATA 7200 RPM Drives. The DS-PDC can easily power any site alongside MS SQL 2005 on the same installation of windows (I suggest you upgrade to 2 GB Of RAM for this setup). You can also use this server to host multiple domains powered by a control panel such as Helm or Plesk. DS-PDCr:     Dual Core Intel® Pentium®D 925, 2x2MB Cache, 3.0GHz, 800MHz FSB.     1 GB PC3200 DDR2 533 MHz Memory.     2 X 80GB, SATA, 3.5-inch, 7.2K RPM Hard Drive.     Rackmounted server. Same as the DS-PDC. However, this configuration offers the benefits of a rack mounted server. Enterprise Line: DS-X1:     Dual Core Intel® Xeon® 5050, 2x2MB Cache, 3.00GHz, 667MHz FSB.     1GB 667MHz (2x512MB), Single Ranked DIMM's.     2 x 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 10K RPM Hard Drive. The DS-X1 will  power a site with a mid amount of traffic with no problem at all. Should your needs grow there is no need to migrate to another hardware platform. Simply snap in a 2nd CPU (reboot required)  as this server offers dual CPU support.     DS-X2:     2 x Dual Core Intel® Xeon® 5050, 2x2MB Cache, 3.00GHz, 667MHz FSB.     1GB 667MHz (2x512MB), Single Ranked DIMM's.     2 x 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 10K RPM Hard Drive. This server meets the perfect demand for a scenario running MS SQL 2005 alongside IIS6 (*60-70 concurrent users). At least 2 GB of RAM is recommenced for this setup. DS-X4:     2 x Quad Core Intel® Xeon® 5050, 2x2MB Cache, 3.00GHz, 667MHz FSB.     1GB 667MHz (2x512MB), Single Ranked DIMM's.     2 x 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 10K RPM Hard Drive. When your application demands this type of power it probably means that you have reached High Availability requirements as well. This can easily be done with NLB on the web server side and clustering or failover on the MS SQL 2005 side.   * This is a "rough" number acquired with StoreFront 6 by Lagarde. Posted May 15 2007, 12:18 AM by caneja with no comments

• Application Pools, be aware of discount ASP.net hosts

  It would be great if we still lived in a static world where you could cram thousands upon thousands of sites into  a server.  In today's web 2.0 world this is not the case. Applications are far more resource demanding than ever before as they become more feature intensive.  In this article I will be discussing what application pools are and the role they play in today's web hosting business model.  This will hopefully allow you to understand how to pick a hosting package not just based off DISK allocation, BANDWIDTH usage, and E-MAIL accounts. The application pool feature was introduced in the IIS6 release. This new model was named "worker process isolation mode" ( this is why you see WP3.exe process running in task manager for each site running in a unique pool). For Windows the asp.net hosts this is the best thing since sliced bread, BUT WHY? Applications POOLS allow you to isolate each asp.net application and cap the resource usage (Memory/CPU). This is an extremely powerful tool in the shared hosting  hosting environment as it makes it extremely easy to control your population.  Back in the IIS5 days there were only 3 types of isolation: Low (InProcess): Very effective in terms of speed.  However, if a site on LOW crashed so did the web service. Excellent for servers running 1 site. Medium (Pooled): Allocates memory to sites running in groups but if one those sites crashed so did the rest ruining on "medium"                            (most commonly used in shared hosting). High (Out Of Process): This was the isolation mode in IIS5, but you could not run every site under this mode generated too much overhead on the server. When IIS6 came along it allowed hosting companies to achieve better uptime by isolation each asp.net site. It also allowed less "iisresets" as problematic sites could be identified, recycled, and disabled (if needed). Imaging rebooting your computer without restarting? Does that make sense? Not at all, but application pools can be restarted without bringing the actual site down.  This is done with the "recycle" option.  Restarting the worker process assigned to an application pool sparks up a new worker process and redirects any new HTTP requests to it. Eventually, this shuts down the "old" worker process "cleaning" up any memory leaks. So what is this all leading up to? Let's do some math... Community Server 2007 (this blog): 70 MB DNN (Dot Net Nuke) 4.3.4: 50 MB Storefront 6.8:  50 MB BV Commerce: 75 MB ASPDotNETStorefront: 120 MB Joomla 1.2.12 : 50 MB   * These annotations were done with zero load. Here is a good example of the appliedi.net plans correlating the ASP.net application pool limits described above. ValuePlus: 100 MB VS-1: 175 MB VS-2: 250 MB VS-3: 350 MB When you choose a hosting package there is a reason why you pay what you pay. Don't just base it off any asp.net discount host or don't just base off the 3 irrelevant resources mentioned earlier. Posted May 09 2007, 02:24 AM by caneja with no comments Filed under: Discount ASP.net Hosts, Application Pools

• MS SQL 2000/2005 Back UP restores via web

  I get asked all the time "how do I move an MS SQL database server from one server to another?". There is a lot involved in doing this by hand (this is a whole different article I will write some other day). The major concern when migrating a DB among servers whether it's from an MS SQL 2000 to the same type environment or if you are upgrading to a 2005  install is the object ownership. It is always best practice to create all of your MS SQL objects as DBO however this is not always the case and in most instances it is out of our reach. We are currently working on the implementation and integration to our existing control panel of a web application that will allow you to manage your back ups and restore options for your MS SQL 2000 or 2005 database. Although this tool has been deployed it is still being in beta testing for our users it is fully functional at: https://sqlbackup.appliedi.net Note that at this time this tool only available for certain MS SQL servers. Live Scenarios: I. Bring your db from another server: You are in the process of developing or migrating an existing ASP or ASP.net application. Obtain a back up database file from the existing server (https://sqlbackup.appliedi.net/). Login to the URL mentioned above (you must have a an existing MS SQL account on one of the available servers). Choose the RESTORE option and follow the steps. The most important step is number 6 as this is the step responsible for doing all the cleaning. II. Grab a backup of your existing db for local storage or local development. Login to the URL mentioned above (https://sqlbackup.appliedi.net). Select the database you wish to backup. You are now ready to back up and download your ".bak" file. Posted May 06 2007, 05:03 AM by caneja with no comments Filed under: sqlbackup.appliedi.net, MS SQL Backup, MS SQL Restore

• Hello World

  Hello World Posted May 06 2007, 04:46 AM by caneja with no comments