Shared Hosting Content Map

by Walter Oliver

Introduction

As a hoster, you know that managing a shared hosting environment is about offering customers an inexpensive place to host their sites and services, while at the same time optimizing your infrastructure and overhead to remain profitable. Typical shared hosting environments include front-end servers for routing requests to their proper content locations, back-end web servers for storing and indexing content, web management services that make it possible for customers to publish and manage their content quickly, and large deployments of web server farms that share a common site configuration synchronized across multiple web servers within the farm. With all that in the mix, it's important to have a solid solution for managing the security, site density, quality of service, and performance optimization of your hosting environment.

This portal page is designed to help you create a service-oriented shared hosting infrastructure by combining a set of products, technologies, and service offerings using Microsoft best practices and guidance. Microsoft offers a complete technology platform for shared hosters to deliver all the components necessary for deploying a highly available, highly scalable, shared hosting environment that includes the following components:

  • Back-end Web Servers. The Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system includes Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5, which is a unified web platform that integrates IIS, Microsoft ASP.NET, and Windows Communication Foundation.
  • Front-end Servers. Microsoft Application Request Routing for IIS 7.5 and above is a proxy-based routing module that forwards HTTP requests to content servers based on HTTP headers, server variables, and load-balance algorithms.
  • Database Servers. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 data management software provides database services to the back-end web servers. SQL Server 2008 R2 also provides a large number of features to optimize security, manage tenant isolation, and improve the performance of the hosted SQL Server 2008 R2 deployment.
  • Web Server Farms. Using IIS 7.5 and above, web farms are supported through the Shared Configuration feature, which makes it possible for administrators to store the IIS server configuration files on a remote share (NAS File Server). This provides the ability to replicate and synchronize configuration among the web servers in the farm.
  • Remote Administration. With IIS 7 and above Remote Administration, hosters can empower their customers to manage their web applications and corresponding database(s) remotely.

To assist hosters who are building out a complete shared hosting solution using the technologies listed above, Microsoft has updated the Microsoft Hosting Deployment Accelerator to become a one-stop shop for hosting guidance on the Microsoft technology that includes documentation, scenario-based licensing guidance, and tools to plan, build, and sell your hosting business.

At the core of the Microsoft Hosting Deployment Accelerator is the latest version of the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for hosters, which helps you create scalable shared host offerings based on Microsoft Hyper-V and the Microsoft System Center Enterprise Suite.

You can find additional resources for understanding Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V technology, Microsoft System Center, Microsoft Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for Hosting, and other related shared hosting topics on this portal.

Content Map

Planning the Web Hosting Architecture

Deploying the Windows Web Platform in Shared Hosting Environments

Verifying the Deployment

Installing Infrastructure Components

Configuring IIS

Migrating

Provisioning and Managing

PowerShell Scripts and C# Code Samples

Using Shared Hosting Environments