Tag Archives: OrcsWeb

Microsoft Azure VM Role Pricing

Posted by on February 27, 2013 No comments

Microsoft Azure has virtual machines (their “VM Role”) for as little as $9.36/month. Wow – that’s a crazy low price! Let’s dig a little deeper in this post though because there seems to remain a lot of confusion on the total cost of a solution.

Let’s compare the Azure VM Role to OrcsWeb’s Cloud Server. OrcsWeb pricing: http://www.orcsweb.com/hosting/pricing/

The base $99 offering at OrcsWeb includes: 40 GB disk, 1 GB RAM, and 1 vCPU. It also includes:

  • Cloudy features including automatic fail-over to another cluster node if there is a hardware failure
  • 250 GB monthly data transfers
  • A single rotating daily backup for DR purposes
  • Both email and telephone support with a 15 minute average response time. If you want administrative support (where OrcsWeb fully administers your server) and support to help you specifically isolate and troubleshoot issues specific to your application, that is covered with the Complete Care Managed Services (CCMS) for $125/month. That also adds 14-day retention to the backups.

How does Azure compare when adding in a few other key features? The base at Azure ($9.36/month) includes 768 MB of RAM, so it’s a lower-resourced solution, but still, we’ll use that to start the comparison. Microsoft Azure pricing for VMs: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?scenario=virtual-machines

  • Automatic fail-over: This might be included – that’s unclear in their materials.
  • 250 GB monthly data transfers +$29.40/month
  • Azure does replicate data for DR purposes in a similar fashion that OrcsWeb does.
  • Support – this is where it gets interesting. Azure support plans and pricing are linked here: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/plans/

The included support with Microsoft Azure (which would put the hosting plan above at $38.76/month so far) is community forums only. Want to open a ticket or call someone? You need to upgrade support levels. Their next level of support (Developer) is an additional $29/month (now we’re up to $67.76) and allows for web-based ticket submissions with a “Fastest Response Time” of up-to 8 hours. Note too that this is the initial response time – not time to resolution. Want to be able to pick up the phone and speak with someone? You can upgrade to the next level of support (Standard) for an additional $300/month (now we’re up to $338.76). That level gives you three (yes, only 3) phone calls per month – which are “call backs” within 2 hours from the time you call them. If you want to drop the response time to 1 hour it takes the Professional Direct level of support at $1,000/month (yes, so $1,038.76/month for a VM!). How about a 15 minute response time? That’s the Premier level of support which starts at $30,000/year or approximately +$2,500/month.

So, if you want a super-cheap Windows VM with no support, Azure might be something to consider. But in my experience, even with development and test machines, support is important and when you need something you probably don’t want to cross your fingers and hope someone in the community forums will help you. Want to be able to send an email or pick up the phone and speak to someone in support, then you are looking at an Azure solution priced at least $338.76/month compared to an OrcsWeb Cloud Server priced at $99.00/month (or $224/month if you want 14 days of backups and complete hands-off system administration).

I hope this helps clarify VM Role pricing at Azure. Happy hosting!

Installing Windows 2012 Server Core plus IIS8

Posted by on February 1, 2013 1 comment

Installing Windows 2012 Server Core plus IIS8 isn’t as hard as you might think. At least it isn’t as hard as I thought!

Server Core can be intimidating to long-time Windows users who expect to see the comfortable familiarity of the Windows desktop (though that has also changed with Server 2012). Rather than a Windows desktop you are presented with a command window and required to make changes through text commands. Hey, what is this – Linux?!? :)

You can relax though. There are actually ways to still manage your server via GUI through the use of various remote tools. That gives the benefit of the smaller footprint and attack surface on your server, but still the ease-of-management that users are use to.

Here’s a great recent post with a few quick steps on getting Windows 2012 Server Core installed (not many steps there – its super-easy) then the command lines needed to install IIS8 and enable it for remote access. Then the few steps required to get connected remotely to manage your server.

http://www.orcsweb.com/blog/jamie-furr/manage-and-install-iis8-on-windows-2012-server-core/

Check it out – it’s likely way easier than you expected!

Happy hosting!

Linking spam sent through shared IIS SMTP server to a user

Posted by on January 8, 2013 1 comment

Microsoft’s IIS SMTP service won’t log usernames even when SMTP-AUTH is enabled and clients are all authenticating. So, what happens if someone starts abusing the SMTP service (or you perhaps have a runaway process performing the abuse)?

Well, it takes a little effort but it is possible to track down the username being used to authenticate to the service. Here’s a post by Jeff Graves of OrcsWeb showing exactly how to track down this information: http://jeffgraves.me/2013/01/08/linking-spam-sent-through-shared-iis-smtp-server-to-a-user/

PUT/POST/DELETE Verb Errors On Site

Posted by on November 30, 2012 1 comment

A client was getting errors when using PUT/POST/DELETE verbs on their web application recently.

The errors he was seeing were:

<h2>405 - HTTP verb used to access this page is not allowed.</h2>
<h3>The page you are looking for cannot be displayed because an invalid method (HTTP verb) was used to attempt access

After some troubleshooting the error was isolated to the fact that WebDav was installed on the server and was intercepting those requests for its own service use.

Rather than removing WebDav from the server, we went looking for another solution. Thankfully someone on Twitter understood the issue and gave an example of changes to make to the client’s web.config file in order to disable (remove) the WebDav module for just that specific site without requiring any manual administrative actions on the server.

The code updates to make to your web.config file to resolve this error are:

<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <handlers>
      <remove name="WebDAV" />
      <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_32bit" />
      <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_64bit" />
      <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-Integrated-4.0" />
      <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_32bit" path="*." verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS" modules="IsapiModule" scriptProcessor="%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_isapi.dll" preCondition="classicMode,runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness32" responseBufferLimit="0" />
      <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_64bit" path="*." verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS" modules="IsapiModule" scriptProcessor="%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\aspnet_isapi.dll" preCondition="classicMode,runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness64" responseBufferLimit="0" />
      <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-Integrated-4.0" path="*." verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS" type="System.Web.Handlers.TransferRequestHandler" preCondition="integratedMode,runtimeVersionv4.0" />
    </handlers>
    <modules>
      <remove name="WebDAVModule" />
    </modules>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

I hope this help. Happy hosting!

Install WebDeploy on Windows Server 2012

Posted by on September 26, 2012 1 comment

Now that Windows Server 2012 & IIS8 are released and gaining adoption ground, it might be useful to check out a walk-through on how to get WebDeploy installed and running on this latest Microsoft server platform.

What’s WebDeploy? It’s a great peice of awesomeness that allows very easy publishing from your local development environment – Visual Studio, Web Matrix, or even via command line – to the hosting platform of your choice. That hosting platform can be any number of web hosts or even a personally owned physical server. It can also be a shared hosting account OR a cloud or physical dedicated hosting account — it doesn’t matter. Besides making publishing easy, that’s another great thing about WebDeploy – the consistency of the deployment process independent of where the final application will ultimately live!

Check out this post if you are self-administering a Windows Server 2012 instance, internally or at a host, or if you’re just curious about the process – perhaps to get it running on your local development server.

How to Install WebDeploy on Windows Server 2012

Happy hosting!