Windows 2000 as a Webhosting Platform? —Continued

Advanced Server Clustering
When your client needs high availability, you need to provide a hosting platform that is always up. Combine a RAID system with hot-swap drives with the clustering feature of Windows 2000 Advanced Server (or the Data Center server—its big brother) running in two or more servers and you are there. The cluster appears to the outside world as if it were one system with a single address, but if one server fails, the other(s) simply take(s) over its duty.

It is said that only death and taxes are guaranteed in life, and that may be the case here. Of course, if one server goes down, anything at all could happen to the second one!

CGI scripts
This topic is always important when the subject of hosting a site on an NT server is raised. Here's the deal: there is such a thing as POSIX and it does provide some functionality similar to some UNIX shell functions on a W2K system, but… if you really want to run a UNIX shell script, I recommend running it on a UNIX system.

CGI, however, is an Interface specification, and not a language. There is always PERL. And thank goodness there is always PERL. This wonderful scripting language works beautifully on W2K. My favorite flavor is Active Perl from Active State Software. Install this and you'll provide your customers with the ability to run PERL scripts simply by naming them with a ".pl" or better yet ".plx" suffix.

Frontpage
Die-hard web programmers shudder at the notion of using Frontpage, but to me that is somewhat naïve—somewhat akin to saying that only good old Wordstar for CP/M (remember that?) should be used for word processing and WYSIWYG processors like Word are for wimps! The fact of the matter is that Frontpage puts the power of web site creation and management into the hands of all kinds of business people and thus expands the hosting market potential dramatically.

Bring Visual Interdev into the mix and you have the ability to easily create powerful database-driven Web sites employing sophisticated VB and Java scripts and all the while needing only a cursory knowledge of HTML. This is progress. These development environments get a mention here because they depend on the host providing "Frontpage Extensions" support, which is, of course, built right in to IIS 5.0. These extensions are also supported on lots of other platforms, but there's nothing quite like the simplicity and power of the manager in W2K / IIS 5.0.

Performance
With the skill employed in the development of today's operating systems, and in particular the attention Microsoft pays to performance issues, coupled with the power and performance of today's computers, this subject is becoming less of an issue for a web hosting environment. When faster performance is needed it is easy and relatively inexpensive to throw more hardware at the problem.

Windows 2000 supports multi-processor machines and is scalable up through its family to large clusters of machines. This means that when you need more horsepower, you'll be able to use it. Windows 2000 has provided some very respectable benchmark test results and in the real world will provide excellent performance for you.

Conclusion
Windows 2000 provides an excellent platform for webhosting. The folks at Microsoft have paid attention to the needs of our marketplace and have delivered a product that fully supports hosting multiple sites on a server or cluster of servers. This is particularly true when the client will be using the Frontpage/Interdev development tools or the like.

Everything works so harmoniously between the client and server that your client can focus on providing content and you can focus on market development rather than customer service calls! If your client is looking for PHP or Shell scripting, however, this may not be the platform on which to host them!

—End

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