http://www.apptheory.comRSS feeds for AppTheory60http://www.apptheory.com/DotNetNuke/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/479/Back-to-basics-Reviewing-the-economics-of-installing-DNN.aspx#Comments0http://www.apptheory.com/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=411&ModuleID=1002&ArticleID=479http://www.apptheory.com/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=479&PortalID=2&TabID=411http://www.apptheory.com/DotNetNuke/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/479/Back-to-basics-Reviewing-the-economics-of-installing-DNN.aspxWhen installing DNN, you may not realize it, but you have a vast array of choices for the root OS & it’s licensing model. Over the next few weeks, I want to look at the options new (and existing) users have with hosting choices. This series of posts will look across several different options and discuss the pro’s and cons of each platform. We will focus exclusively on production focused installs as there are numerous ways to alleviate the pain for test server installs…   Option 1: Hosted Windows virtual servers. Chances are good these days that if you want to build a website, you have already looked at shared hosting servers for your installation. Most of these vendor’s solutions revolve around large datacenters of server farms, firewalls, intelligent switches, even LAN and WAN load balancing. It is also highly likely to see these virtual servers running on virtual machine front end systems with a SAN solution tied to the back end with very high speed bandwidth in place inside the datacenter. In short, good quality architectures. These servers are then leased at a varied rate, depending on the hosting company you choose. Typically these servers can be found for far cheaper than any other leased solution and provide a great deal of benefit to you. What are the Microsoft licensing costs? Microsoft allows these hosting providers several options for monetizing their hardware investment. SPLA, Windows Server Datacenter Edition, Standard licensing and of course some type of volume discount where applicable. The good news for you? You don’t have to pay any of that and are free from licensing woes. You have transferred the cost and risks to the hosting provider. So are there any downsides with this approach? Yes, depending on your choice, some of the downsides include “over selling”, server performance, lack of control and quality of support. Most straight web hosting solutions will also not include nightly backups or DNN application support. The hardest downside here to assess before signing up with any potential provider is their “over selling”. To maximize the return on their hardware investment, hosting companies may “over sell”. This means they promise more bandwidth, CPUs or ram for the quantity of customers on a virtual server than physically exist. This in practice, can actually be fine… (Customer A has all their traffic before noon while Customer B has all their traffic after noon). The challenge becomes managing and predicting this over selling. It may be at the root of your performance woes and not easily fixed. In short, the economics work out so that you can really see this solution as the entry point for a new DNN installation. Pros include licensing, price, less risk, typically high uptime and some nice management tools (admin consoles). The cons, depending on your provider, can be lack of control, age of hardware, lack of backups (typically your responsibility via FTP), over selling, performance (when compared to dedicated hardware) and lack of in depth knowledge of DNN. If a hosted virtual server is in your future, do some research first. Surf the web for forums, looking for quality windows hosts with sufficient DNN knowledge.Travis CrittendenFri, 07 Aug 2009 20:13:48 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:479http://www.apptheory.com/DotNetNuke/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/473/Using-ldquoXUACompatiblerdquo-META-tags-with-IE-8-and-DNN.aspx#Comments2http://www.apptheory.com/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/RssComments.aspx?TabID=411&ModuleID=1002&ArticleID=473http://www.apptheory.com/DesktopModules/DnnForge%20-%20NewsArticles/Tracking/Trackback.aspx?ArticleID=473&PortalID=2&TabID=411http://www.apptheory.com/DotNetNuke/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/473/Using-ldquoXUACompatiblerdquo-META-tags-with-IE-8-and-DNN.aspxIE has added a compatibility view icon to the address bar of the browser. By default, this icon shows, but is disabled for out of the box DNN installs. But if you visit a site like www.Google.com, you will notice the “broken page” icon is missing from the address bar. How do you get your DNN site to act this way? You need to add a META tag in the <HEAD> </HEAD> area of your web page. Easy enough right? You log in and go to Page Settings | Advanced Settings and specify whatever meta tags you want and they will be added to the head section. However, just doing this is not enough to make the icon go away. This method only adds the tag to the bottom of the <HEAD> </HEAD> section for the page. For this to work, you need to add it to the top of the head section of your web page instead. One option for this type of change is to edit the “default.aspx” file on your server to contain the correct tag format at the top of head section.   For IE 7 compatibility add: <meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7" /> For IE 8 compatibility add: <meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8" /> * note: this will affect the rendering mode in IE 8 for all pages which use this default.aspx file. Travis CrittendenThu, 30 Jul 2009 20:40:00 GMTf1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:473