hosting on Server 2003

[gibby]

Can anyone suggest any guides or books that I can use to guide me in developing a hosting service on Windows Server 2003 Web Edition? I just bought a new Athlon 3200+ with Windows Server 2003 and I want to use it to host multiple websites from within an office network. The OS has just been freshly installed and I need to know where to go from here. What books or tutorials can you guys direct me to that will help me in this regard?

[Horus_Kol]

I've kind of just learnt as I've gone along...

the Microsoft Knowledge Base is a useful tool...

One big suggestion:

create two partitions on your hard drive - have the Operating System and software on one partition, and all the data on another. That way, if you ever need to trash the system, you don't lose your data.


I've only ever administered a web-server, so I can't help you much with ftp-servers.

With the web-server aspect - IIS and Apache have the ability to handle multiple domains/sites quite easily. If you are using standard HTTP connections (not SSL) then you can distinguish sites by the "host header" (basically the domain name) without the need for multiple IP addresses. Unfortunately, because SSL encrypts that information using a HTTPS connection means that you have to distinguish sites by the IP address.

I've never used Apacher, so can't tell you how it compares to IIS - but I have had no problems with IIS at all on many web-servers.

[xxxBelowMExxx]

Hello gibby,

Well there is a Suite of softwares combined for just what you are looking for, but it is all Open-Source software, it is Pre-complied and has a auto-install for you. It runs

Apache 2.0.52
httpd.conf (optimized and minimized, setup for SSL, PHP, CGI, mod_deflate, mod_perl, Access Control)
mod_ssl (OpenSSL 0.9.7e)
mod_deflate (zlib 1.1.4)
OpenSSL 0.9.7e

Perl 5.8.6
libwww-perl
libwin32
HTML::Template
HTML::Parser
Compress::Zlib
FCGI
mod_perl 1.99_18 (2.0.0-RC1)

PHP 4.3.10

MySQL 4.0.23
DBI
DBD::mysql
DBD::mysqlPP
Net::MySQL

phpMyAdmin 2.6.0-pl3 (Setup for multi-user environment; Relational Features enabled)
analog 5.32

and if you want a fourm on the server, use PHPBB

I dont use IIS( I have in the past, but choose not too). I like the Open-Source software.

The Server Suite can be found at : http://www.devside.net/web/server/free/setup/instructions
and click on "Web Server Suite"


If you choose this route, I can send or post great tutorial for this software or help one of the softwares listed above....
and I can help also....

[xxxBelowMExxx]

If you are going to go the route of ISS. PLEASE......... MAKE sure you lock it down!

Go to - http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Installing_Securing_IIS_Servers_Part1.html

For an awesome tut. on how to lockdown ISS, I have use it many times for clients
It is the best I have seen on ISS security.