8) Windows® Services on the Hostopia Platform

• Microsoft® Windows hybrid services provided by Hostopia provide basic ASP, ColdFusion, Access and MS SQL services targeted at the needs of SME’s at a price point considerably lower than a dedicated Windows solution. 

• With the ability to use both UNIX and Windows technologies in unison the Hybrid solution offers a less complicated, more robust, lower cost method for users to make use of the most popular Windows hosting features.

• Once a customer has enabled Windows services, the hosting system knows to send Windows specific requests to Windows servers based on file extension. (.html, .shtml, etc. ) will be served by UNIX servers, .asp and .cfm requests will be served by Windows 2003 servers. This is made possible by Hostopia’s redundant, distributed architecture. 

• Site content is housed on Network Filers – not individual web servers – this, along with removing individual web servers as a point of failure, allows content for one site to be served through multiple machines. In this system a user can mix UNIX and Windows content in the same site.

A) Differences between Windows only Hosting and the Hybrid System

• Permissions – Permissions on the entire Hostopia system are UNIX based even for Windows content. (The correct UNIX permission settings for .asp or .cfm files is -rw-r--r-- or 644)

• Superior redundancy provided by distributed, clustered architecture

• Case Sensitivity – The Hostopia System is case sensitive – this can be bypassed using a .htaccess file placed in the users public directory (syntax = CaseInsensitive ON)

• Designers can mix UNIX and Windows functionality in the same hosting environment

• Simplified UNIX security model

• Front Page – Front Page extensions on the Hybrid Platform are handled by the UNIX servers.  The Hostopia system handles most FrontPage functionality (forms, themes, etc…). However, direct database integration via the FrontPage interface is currently non functional.

• DSNs – Limit of 2 DSNs and they must follow our naming conventions: prefix_domain_com

• Paths – Local system paths (i.e. C:\My Documents) cannot be used since site content is not stored locally

• Supported Language platforms– HTML, PHP, CGI’s, and PERL are not served off the Windows portion of the hybrid system. These scripting languages are parsed by the UNIX portion of the hybrid

B) Functional Components

Microsoft Access 2000/02/03

Why is MS ACCESS 2000/02 software only functional and not optimized on your architecture?

• Microsoft Access was designed as a single-user desktop database, and not for server use.

• MS ACCESS 2000/02/03 is functional on our system and suits web applications well when dealing with small- to medium-size business websites, which deal with a reasonably low level of traffic; however, the functional design limitations of MS ACCESS itself (being a desktop program as opposed to a server program) increases the likelihood of poor performance when large numbers of users make simultaneous calls to the Access database.

• For these reasons, it is recommended that MS ACCESS be used solely for development purposes and not for production.

Recommended Alternative:

• Although MS-Access 2000/02/03 is functional and works reasonably well on our system in most situations, you may benefit from upgrading to a true multi-user database platform such as MS SQL or MySQL.

• We have found that sporadic performance issues occur when traffic-intensive sites run on Microsoft Jet and IIS. We have ensured that our system is using the latest Microsoft Jet Components and Updates. We recommend that the native Jet OLE DB provider be used in place of the Access ODBC Driver.

• Excerpt from Readme.txt (IIS)

• The following article outlines Microsoft's recommendations to implement an SQL Server Database for use under IIS to accommodate for web, commerce, and transactional applications.

• http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q299973

ASP/ColdFusion + MS ACCESS

Why are ASP/ColdFusion + MS ACCESS only functional and not optimized on your architecture?

• MS ACCESS was designed as a single-user desktop database, and not for server use. MS-Access 2000/02/03 is functional on our system and suits web applications well when dealing with small- to medium-size business websites that handle a low level of traffic; however, when used on larger enterprise-type websites with a heavy amount of concurrent users making requests to an MS ACCESS database, unpredictable results may occur.

• We recommend that MS ACCESS be used solely for development purposes and not for production.

Recommended Alternative:

• Although MS-Access 2000/02/03 is functional on our system, for performance and reliability we strongly recommend the use of MS SQL Server for the deployment of production-quality Web applications. Although Active Server Pages work with any ODBC-compliant database (such as MS ACCESS), it has been extensively tested and is designed to work with Microsoft SQL Server. Although the sample Web site and examples in this release use Microsoft Access, we recommend that MS ACCESS be used solely for development purposes and not for production.

• The following article outlines Microsoft's recommendations to implement an SQL Server Database for use under IIS to accommodate for web, commerce, and transactional applications.

• http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q299973