I am launching a new redesigned website on windows hosting. I am wondering what is the best way to launch this new website without having any downtime on the existing one?
MY only fear is having a user go to visit a page and it's not there or the supporting files are not uploaded yet.
One of the simplest ways to handle this is to put a load balancer or proxy server in front of the application server. Then set up another application server with the new code. Once it is ready, you can change the proxy server to point to the new application server with the new code. Once you are sure nobody is using the old application server, you can shut it down. This, of course, relies on your ability to get that setup in place. If you are on a budget, you might be able to do it all on a single box. For instance, you could use nginx as a reverse proxy to your application on the same box. Getting that in place could potentially cause a tiny window of downtime - not sure if that's acceptable. Then you might be able to set up the new application on the same box with a different port - again, I'm not sure if that would work for your setup. Anyway, the reverse proxy approach is a pretty common one, and one of the great reasons for deploying to the cloud. You only pay for the short period of time when you need both boxes.
You should make sure that your new website launches all at once and that you set up the proper redirection rules for all previous pages. Once you are launching the new website, pick a time at night where you have low traffic volume, and simply upload all the new code at once to the webserver. This eliminates the fear you have of the "supporting files not uploaded yet". One of the key things to do is make sure all your old pages redirect and map over to new pages on the site just in case anyone clicks into your site using external links.
Two good resources to read:
http://www.rise.net/blog/ideal-way-launch-website-rebrand
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html
The best methos is to upload the site via FTP, and if you have RD access to login into the Windows server and to copy the new site for a few seconds. In this way you will not have any downtime as when you directly upload the site via FTP.
Related
My website is working with some ISP while it is not working with others. Also not working from other countries.
The app is hosted at our company. Developed using sharepoint asp.net.
The app works at my home.
But if I visit the website at my brother's home who is registered to different ISP, the website opens and a login dialog appears. When entering correct username and password then submit , textboxs cleared and dialog come again.
The problem is happening with many visitors.
I just want to know what would be the problem! Does anyone faced such problem before?
I checked all IIS restrictions. There is no restrictions made.
I created a new app using sharepoint with login page and it works great.
somebody said that users with public ip can access the site while others with dhcp cannot. Can somebody explain that !
Some ISPs have transparent proxies in use. And some of them are accidentally (or even intentionally) broken and cache more, than they should. You can check whether that's the problem:
Set up your server to also allow https and then use that. You should move to https for privacy reasons anyways, so just do it now ;)
This way, the proxy can't do anything but to pass the data between client and server unmodified.
If that is not an option: Use tcpdump/wireshark/other-sniffer on both - client and server - at the same time and compare the logs. Did the second access even make it to the server?
Do you have a laptop/tablet/smartphone with which you can access the web server? Try moving that laptop from one location to the other and check, whether it works with that one laptop using one ISP and fails with the same laptop on the other ISP.
This should be a comment, but I do not have enough to post it as such.
Are sure that it is not a browser issue?
Is the login dialog from SharePoint, your app or the browser itself?
If it is from your app, can you debug it or write the log-in attempts in a log?
I inherited a mess of servers which host multiple applications on IIS6, protected by R6 SiteMinder. The environment is soon going to R12, and we have also received some new servers with IIS7.5. (Lots of change, all within the next 60days.)
I am not an expert, and so am having trouble with some of the more detailed steps of configuration. Thus far, on the new server I am able to create and apply SiteMinder to the DefaultWebSite (and everything contained within), and any custom Sites that I create. Unfortunately in our environment, it is already set up with a handful of applications that live underneath DefaultWebSite, only some of which we desire SiteMinder protection.
In IIS6 I was able to simply add a site to SiteMinder authentication by applying the ISAPI6WebAgent.dll in the wildcard mappings. In IIS7.5, this does not seem to work. I follow the specific details in the installation manual and it seems like it is either an all-or-nothing situation: everything under DefaultWebSite is protected, or nothing is.
This will cause a SIGNIFICANT amount of additional work in my environment (and it also means upgrading in place is not possible, so all applications that require SiteMinder authentication will need to be migrated in the next 60 days.) Is there ANY workaround for this? Google has not provided me with any solutions, and my SiteMinder team is claiming "it is no longer possible with IIS7.5" to keep the environment the way it is currently set up.
Any and all help appreciated.
For those that care, if you are running under an Integrated App Pool, you can simply add and remove the SiteMinder modules to control which sites are protected by SiteMinder. This DOES work on apps below a virtual directory - and using the config files you can both inherit protection by default, or have it unprotected and add it later by simply "Configure Native Module" and adding it back.
I have setup a brand new Orchard CMS 1.5.1 site using Web Platform Installer on Windows 2008 Server. I wanted to test out the Performance settings so I configured the following Warmup entries one per line:
/
/blog
...and checked the following options:
x Generate warmup pages periodically 90 Every minutes
x Generate warmup pages any time some content is published
When I visit the site the performance was still a bit slow. The Performance Warmup settings show each page has a status of zero and a red "down arrow" icon next to it.
Is there anything else I need to enable? Is there anything I am missing in the configuration like permissions, etc.
UPDATE:
I have noticed that my site does not have a folder to store the warm up pages. I added that folder manually but it still didn't fix my problems. Are there permissions I would need to set on that folder?
UPDATE 2:
After talking with Sebastien Ros, I think I understand what is wrong but still don't know how to fix it. The base URL setting in Orchard is set to "www.mydomain.com" as it should be but networking-wise my server does not allow my site to go out to the internet and query itself by that address in order to generate the warm-up page. To make matters worse, I have several sites that are hosted on the same IP address and using host headers to distinguish between sites. This prevents me from even being able to configure the base URL as a local IP address (which cause issues with other modules anyway).
Not sure what alternatives I have now.
Thanks,
Brian
Make sure that the general settings page is pointing to your base URL, i.e. http://mywebsite.com.
It may be pointing to the local host by default.
I confirmed with a Network Engineer at my server host that there was a networking restriction on outgoing requests coming back in for the web site. So, the performance module could not query www.mydomain.com and get an answer. Once the network restriction was removed, I was able see Warm-ups create the cache pages with a Status 200.
Alternatively, it was suggested that I create entries in my host file for each of my Orchard sites. I did not try this but I see no reason why it would not work even with the host-headered scenario that I have.
Brian
new to dreamhost here and have followed the wiki on this but still need some additional help if possible. I want to be able to preview a site while I work on it, before I point the live domain to my dreamhost server. I've added the domain via the Control Panel, and all my files sit in the directory, /home/user/mysite.com - which is correct I think. When trying to follow the wiki with regards the mirroring details, I find that the only option I have is as follows, where I can't change any of these details:
Create the mirror at: mysite.com
Mirror this site: existingsite.com
The existingsite.com is just a live site sitting on the same server space. Is there something I'm missing here? Probably a newb mistake no doubt :)
Mirroring is for you to point a domain to an existing site. Hence this means you can mirror on 1 site. ie. both existingsite.com and mirrorsite.com points to the same server space.
If you want to create a development site, you probably are talking about 2 installations.
In this case, a quick and dirty trick I use is to create a development subdomain, dev.existingsite.com and fully host it. You normally get a /home/user/dev.existingsite.com folder with this. When your site is fully ready, you can edit your fully hosted existingsite.com and point the web directory to dev.existingsite.com. A better way is to SSH in and move the files.
There's an option copy files over in the settings page. Anyway dreamhost live help is pretty good. This is definitely something they will answer.
I have recently installed a website project on Azure and that was relatively easy to do thanks to great docs online. We are having a problem with the back office (admin) login though, it's a bit strange, as it didn't happen straight away, I shall elaborate....
When I go to http://www.keelycattschoolofdance.co.uk/umbraco/ it takes me to the login page, which seems fine.
(The url at this point becomes www.keelycattschoolofdance.co.uk/.../login.aspx)
I then login, which works and it starts to display the admin panels but then bounces back to the login and the URL becomes www.keelycattschoolofdance.co.uk/.../login.aspx
I am running this on Azure using the Accelerator, latest version of Umbraco and using SQL CE 4.0 rather than SQL Server.
has anyone seen this before?
Please let me know if you need more information, I shall respond :-)
Thanks in advance
Nick
It sounds like it may be a Session error. This is a problem for Azure and Umbraco because Azure uses round robin load balancing.
The normal way of setting up an Umbraco site using the accelerator would be to have a separate session DB where the shared session state is stored.
Make sure you are using this accelerator for Umbraco on Azure as it's the latest and best.
http://waacceleratorumbraco.codeplex.com/
We have several large production sites using this and I can confirm they all work fine (including the backend editing environment).
Things to watch out for are that you need to follow the instructions closely as they are easy to get wrong :-)
Make sure you don't have dashes in your db names as this makes things go wrong as well.
Finally if you are using more than one web role the Umbraco preview can sometimes yellow screen, as the preview XML may not be on the server that gets to the preview request. This is again because of the round robin load balancing.