Web hosting on Windows I: Not on my worst enemy
Thu 10 Jan 08 01:17 | Tags: Programming, Web Hosting, Windows
My new year's resolutions that I probably have no chance of not breaking are, in no particular order:
- Exercise more. This desk job isn't making me any thinner.
- Get my credit cards and student loan paid off and never go into debt again ever ever ever.
- Start posting regularly on Ray Gun Robot again.
But it's not like I've been lazy this whole time. Quite the contrary, I was working on the biggest web project of my entire life. Namely: the web site for The Eureka Reporter, a local newspaper.
Like all good projects of any size and substance, this was definitely a learning experience. We decided to go with the excellent Drupal content management system, which is made all the more amazing when you can code your own modules for it -- which I learned to do, with the help of a most excellent book entitled Pro Drupal Development. Maybe some time in the future I'll convert RGR to Drupal…
So the programming was not so much a challenge… it was just pretty voluminous, and learning the Drupal way of doing things was new. One particularly tricky thing was finding a way to convert the paper's printed pages to Flash files without cheating and just turning the pages into huge bitmaps (PDFs were nixed as being too easy to download). Well, we did it… I'm afraid just how is going to have to stay a bit of a trade secret.
There is one part of the project I'd like to talk about, however… The experience with getting the frickin' thing up and hosted and visible to the world. The Reporter's parent company is a rather large financial firm which has its own data center. (The newspaper is something of a pet project of the company's head honcho.) We were told (or, at least, had assumed that we were told) by our main contact at the Reporter that we would have access to a Unix- or Linux-powered server of some sort, but apparently there was a miscommunication somewhere, because very late in the project, once we finally got access to the parent company's IT department (the thickest stack of non-disclosure agreements I've ever seen and a few layers of corporate bureaucracy stood in our way), we found out they were a Microsoft-only operation; Windows 2003, Exchange email servers, MSSQL databases, IIS web servers, the whole bit -- the previous CMS that we were replacing had been written in ASP. So when they heard we wanted to run a PHP app with a MySQL backend running through LightTPD on some flavor of Unix or Linux, they were like, "you want to put what on our iron? Uh… no."
So then we scrambled to consider third-party hosting solutions, to which they replied, "you want to put our data on a server outside of our own four walls? Uh… no." Did I mention we were supposed to go live in less than a week at this point?
Well. At this point, I was expecting their IT guys to be real hard-you-know-whats, so I was pleasantly surprised when they got back to us with a compromise. For the initial launch, we could go ahead and use a shared hosting provider, just for the time being. However, they were going to set up a Windows 2003 server for us, and we were going to be expected to use that. Furthermore, we could install whatever software we wanted on it, but they would only be responsible for tech support to the extent of Windows itself; we were on our own as far as troubleshooting beyond that.
A fair compromise given the circumstances, I think; it meant we didn't have to rewrite Drupal in friggin' ASP or anything. However, it meant that I still needed to learn how to set up and run a Windows 2003 server, and fast.
I will go into detail into the trials and errors involved with this (and boy, were there a lot of errors), but I'll sum it all up here. In the Unix/Linux hosting world, I can use a mail server from here, a web server from there, a programming language from these people, a database by those people, and an operating system originally conceived by hippie-nerds in Berkeley decades ago, and even though all these things are made by different people, odds are they'll work together quite well. However, I've come to the conclusion that, on Windows, the most successful way to tackle the project is exactly as The Reporter's parent company was doing it; use Microsoft's mail server and Microsoft's web server and Microsoft's programming language and Microsoft's database on Microsoft's operating system. Once you venture outside of Microsoft's little bubble, any guarantees of interoperability go out the window. Now, of course, different people (especially those who have formal training in running Windows-based servers) will have different experiences, but as you read more about my personal experiences in the days to come, you'll see that it was quite simple for me to reach this conclusion.
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