So Brad … tell us a bit about how ORCS Web came to be back in 1996. Brad: I had already been doing Windows development for a long time when, back in 1996, I started doing web development with Microsoft technologies. At that time I noticed that most web hosts had limited support and understanding of the Microsoft technologies. The customers I did work for needed a reliable hosted solution for their applications, so I decided to purchase a server to address the need myself. That was the birth of ORCS Web. Our initial customer base was mainly customers who wanted to build upon Microsoft’s new technologies to allow data-driven interaction in their sites – often online searchable product inventories and other dynamic solutions.
Considering that you need to maintain such high-traffic sites, how do you feel about Microsoft’s support group? Scott: Our experiences with support have been excellent, actually. Support has been one of Microsoft’s strengths for years. Any time we need to get something solved, we get it solved, in short order. We can always go to PSS and get some really impressive people to work on the issue regardless of what it is. So the support we have been able to get from Microsoft is great. We ask some very difficult questions at times, and the PSS group will do what it takes to pull in the people necessary to solve the issue. We feel that, compared to the LAMP stack, we are backed not just by a free-form community out there, but by a specific company that will ensure support for us no matter what happens .
Outside of calling Microsoft directly, what has been your experience with community-based support around Microsoft products? Scott: The whole ASP.NET and IIS community has been communicating very well, and I think people have grown to appreciate that. The community has been built up over the years and continued to be more and more valuable over time. That was a weakness before, when LAMP had a much stronger community, but things have really come around and now the community around ASP.NET, IIS, and Windows is quite strong.
Brad: It used to be that you had to go to the newsgroups alone to get really good interaction from the community. But now you have the ASPAdvice lists where you can get almost immediate responses not only from peers who are MVPs but from other members of the community who might know the answer to a problem. The ASP.NET forums have been very popular as well.
What has been your experience with the speed at which Microsoft supplies patches and critical updates? Dave: Previously, I worked for a Web hoster that was 100 percent Linux focused; that was before I came to ORCS Web. From that experience, I learned that patch management is very different from the way Windows updates are sent to us every second week of the month. LAMP was not that kind of environment. You had to roll with it and learn from the people who already had experience patching the systems.
Scott: Microsoft releases a patch to the whole world on the exact same day, giving us the opportunity to respond in a predictable fashion. And the way that they are addressing it with such a large operating system as Windows is actually quite impressive.
Dave, since you previously worked at a Linux-only Web hoster, what kind of perceptions did you have of Windows’ reliability prior to coming to ORCS Web, and what are your perceptions of Windows’ reliability today?
Dave: I would hear horror stories such as “Oh, Microsoft’s servers will go down, they will get that Blue Screen of Death,” etc. Prior to coming here I had limited experience with Microsoft, but when I came here it was nothing like the stories I’d heard. The servers never go down. It’s incredible to me. It has been the complete opposite of what I was told. It sounded like it was going to be just horrible working with these machines, but my experiences are the opposite of what I was led to believe.
Scott: From my perspective, overall stability has been excellent with Windows. We really appreciate what IIS, ASP.NET, and Windows can do for us in that regard. Every year Windows, IIS, and ASP.NET get better and better, and the arguments that used to work do not work anymore. The arguments that people hold onto are really from the past. The perception is coming around, but a lot of the Linux community has not realized it yet. They have not seen the reports; they have not been educated on how much more solid it is than it used to be.
Outside of IIS and ASP.NET, what else do you leverage from the Windows platform on a daily basis? Scott: We rely heavily on Active Directory. In the past we had individual servers and pass-through authentication set up on those servers. We would enter a user on each individual machine and have to make sure the username and password were the same on each server. When we had to do a password change we would have to change each individually at essentially the same time. So for user management, Active Directory and Windows are great. Any user who has to access multiple Windows boxes we just manage in one place. We leverage a number of other Microsoft technologies too, including SQL Server, DNS, SMS, ADS, and WDS for deployment purposes.
Dave, beyond reliability and stability perception changes, what else have you noticed about Windows since coming to ORCS Web? Dave: I really cannot see any problems with Windows at all. I think it’s a great solution. It’s very easy to use and I love the user interface. With UNIX, for example, it’s all command line—just being able to click a button and having many different ways of doing things rather than needing to type out a whole UNIX command to get things done. Just being able to click a box, check a box, answer yes or no, that just makes things a whole lot easier and more enjoyable to work with.
Just to wrap up, then, what are your thoughts about IIS 7.0 that’s coming out as part of Windows Server 2008? Brad: We have been running IIS 7.0 servers around here for well over a year now as part of early release programs. We like to deploy and test new technologies because that gives us a running start when the new product is released. The types of people we hire appreciate that part of our culture because they get to continually learn and gain exposure to new Microsoft technologies. They prefer to learn and grow rather than working with the same thing repeatedly.
Scott: There is not much that IIS 7.0 cannot do. Right out of the box, it has the vast majority of things you want. Yet, from authentication and authorization through the entire IIS pipeline, you can fully extend it, just like Apache. The configuration structure is also very impressive in terms of it being completely XML-based, so it is very easy to extend.
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