I have seen numerous blogs written over the past couple of years talking about some of the challenges migrating a classic ASP application from IIS 5 or IIS 6 to IIS 7 or IIS 7.5.  However I still see a lot of new questions to various forums about these same issues.  I would like to provide some guidance on the first couple of steps that you should take to learn more about what is really going on with your application.

"IO" stands for input/output. IOPs stands for input/output operations per second.

Every time something is written to, or read from, a storage solution - that generates an IO operation. Physical disks have a limited number of IO operations per second (IOPs) that they can handle. Storage devices - including servers with local drives - often include multiple physical disks so the IOPs capacity would be a calculated combination of those resources, taking into account RAID level overhead and other factors.

If your application, or a combination of all the applications using that storage system, generate IOPs traffic in excess of the systems maximum IOPs capacity, the requests start to queue up and wait - meaning everything starts to run just a bit slower. Then as IOPs load continues to increase, things run slower and slower until performance is no longer acceptable.

It is very important to properly scale your system in a way that can support IOPs well in excess of the expected load - to allow for both traffic increases and to handle short bursts when they arise.

I was just pondering a comment from one of our clients - American Challenge - on our most recent Customer Satisfaction Survey.

"Very happy with the People and Services. My only suggestion; a better marketing program. You have a Very Good product but nobody knows." - Bruce Laker, President; American Challenge; www.Achallenge.com

That's great feedback Bruce - thanks for sharing!

Another client recently stated that we were the best kept secret in hosting solutions. It sounds like we need to continue working on our marketing efforts. :-)

Not everyone seems to realize this, so here is a post to clarify... The box in the middle of our Windows Cloud Server page has tabbed dynamic content. There are five tabs across the top of that box and the content changes as someone clients one of the tabs. If you didn't know that, check it out. That fifth tab is a really cool cost calculator that we've gotten a lot of compliments on.

Happy Hosting!

~Brad

We've released an update to our control panel that addresses some performance issues that existed with our integrated IIS Management features.

The previous version of the IIS management tool that we built into our control panel was very performance-dependant on the size of the client's website - often the tool would take several minutes to load, making it just about unusable for some clients. The new version of the code has addressed this performance issue and the IIS management tool (enabled for shared hosting clients) should now load for all shared hosting sites in just a matter of seconds.

Happy Hosting!

~Brad

Microsoft Office 2010 is now available and there is a free trial download available.

We want you to succeed! We do. Really.

At OrcsWeb we're all about relationships. We aren't in the mass-market bulk-hosting business. Through our enterprise architected solutions, our deep technical skills, and our focus on both service and support - we work to build long term relationships with our clients. Some of our clients have been with us for the full fourteen years that we've been providing managed Windows hosting solutions.

Our teams work hard to make your teams successful. If we help you succeed then your business will grow, and at some point your web infrastructure will grow, and we'll help that new solution be successful and provide value to your business too. It's a wonderful win-win scenario.

If you aren't already a client at OrcsWeb we invite you to check out our services - Cloud Server Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, and Managed Shared Hosting - and even get in touch with us to chat about your needs. We welcome the opportunity to develop a relationship with you and your team, and to help you succeed in your Internet projects.

Our shared hosting services are not normal shared hosting services. Our clients understand this but many people who haven't had direct experience with us just don't understand what's different - besides the pricing.

We have all the super-cool redundant and high-performing architecture of course, and many of those things that we consider basic set us apart themselves.

But what really sets us apart... our shared hosting is fully managed hosting. Yes, the same level of managed hosting that commands fairly high fees in the enterprise hosting market. We don't just give our clients some space and let them fend for themselves.

Talk is cheap, right? What are some examples?

Here are just three of the many things we do for our shared clients:

• We assist in isolating performance issues. If a client's application isn't performing as well as they'd like, we help them pinpoint the bottleneck area so they can focus their efforts efficiently in addressing the issue. We have tools that often allow us to tell them what part of their application is causing the slow down and what resource is being taxed.
   
• When a client has a code error, we help point them towards a solution. No one intimately knows the code for a specific application other than the person who wrote it, but we do help research error messages and occasionally even review short code snippets for clients to help them in resolving (ASP.NET-specific) coding issues.
   
• When we notice load on database servers, even if a client isn't noticing any impact, we provide tips to the clients on ways that will better optimize their database usage - giving their end-users a better online experience, and also ensuring the maximum performance for all clients on those shared servers. This includes SQL profiling to identify long running queries or sometimes to suggest database index changes.

Our clients interact with us just as if we were their internal Web Ops team. Our goal is to handle their web needs so they can focus on their business. We want them to succeed, which often means getting more involved than just setting them up and billing them. We also go through these levels of managed services because it optimizes the performance across all the servers, which means a better experience for all of our shared hosting clients - faster load times, better resource utilization, etc. It is a huge win-win for everyone.

Oh, and by the way, we have managed dedicated and managed cloud hosting services available too! 

We upgraded the firmware on some network devices during last month's maintenance window. Before that, they had some impressive uptime:

The devices are configured with HA redundancy, so the rolling firmware upgrades went beautifully with minimal downtime during the route convergence and no manual intervention.

Here is an interesting graphic from Focus.com that explains a bit of what HTML5 does, why you should care, and how browsers rate for current compatibility: http://www.focus.com/images/view/11905/