MaximumASP Weblog

We just launched a free hosting account based on MaxESP for those wanting to test out ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 in a hosted environment. Visit http://aspnet4beta.maximumasp.com/ to create your free account. Here are the specs:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 / IIS 7.5
• .NET Framework 4 Beta 2
• 1GB disk space
• 50 MB SQL Server 2008 database
• MS Deploy Access
• FTP over SSL Access

We allow you to create one website and also give you an extra DCU so you can test your website in a scalable environment. Sign up now!

We are delighted to announce our participation in the DotNetNuke Fusion Partner Program. We first started hosting DotNetNuke five years ago, on September 29th, 2004. We’ve been there from the get go as they’ve grown alongside us, so being one of their Gold Partners in their Fusion Partner Program was an obvious decision.

You can now purchase DotNetNuke Professional Edition directly from us. The Professional Edition of DotNetNuke has all the features you know and love about DotNetNuke plus:

• Advanced Content Approval Process – Administrators can create custom workflows with an unlimited number of states and reviewers
• Google Analytics for Marketing – Support for advanced Google Analytics functionality such as visitor type, landing page, role, or referrer segmentation
• Granular Permissions – Page, module and folder level extended permissions provide more granular security rights
• File Integrity Checking – Checks files in the installation and reports any inconsistencies which may impact website reliability
• Web Server Farm Support – New caching provider delivers more efficient resource usage in web farms
• Health Monitoring – Pings the website periodically to identify failures and will notify the site owner. Also ensures the site stays in web server memory for faster user accessibility
• Vulnerability Database – Maintains a vulnerability database for each product version to easily identify potential issues

We are also members of the Microsoft WebsiteSpark program which allows professional web developers visibility, support and software with no upfront cost. Combine Microsoft WebsiteSpark, DotNetNuke and our Microsoft Hosting Partner of the Year award winning hosting, and you have the ideal platform for your business.

Check out this video to see how easy it is to use MaximumASP and MaxESP to get your DotNetNuke website up and running in minutes!

Making sure that you can publish your content and manage your site securely was one of our top priorities while developing MaxESP. Typical shared hosting relies on unsecured FTP for publishing, resulting in your content being sent in clear-text across the internet. With application content containing secure and sensitive information such as encryption keys and passwords in their content, we wanted to ensure that you could publish your content in a secure manner while using MaxESP.

To accomplish this we’ve done two things. The first is to enable FTP over SSL. But not every publishing application supports FTPS. So we’ve included a secure SSL VPN with every MaxESP account. If you’ve already have a MaxESP account, simply log into the MaximumASP Account Center and click the VPN tab. This page will guide you through the requirements needed to connect via our SSL VPN and directs you to the SSL VPN.

We’re very excited about this feature, and not just for MaxESP. We’ll soon be rolling this out to all MaximumASP customers. This will allow all kinds of new possibilities for new and existing customers to securely manage their hosted applications.

Sorry for the lack of updates of late, but it’s been for a good reason. We’ve been hard at work creating our latest product, MaxESP.

MaximumASP started in 2000 doing shared hosting, and over the years we’ve grown into doing dedicated server hosting, virtual server hosting with our MaxV product, and soon we’ll be doing co-location at our new data center. But we haven’t forgotten where we came from, and MaxESP lets us get back to our roots.

We still have customers looking for a secure and scalable solution that is easy to manage and easy on their budget.  So we’ve taken our nine year's experience doing web hosting and combined that with our expertise in cutting-edge Microsoft products like Windows 2008 R2 and IIS 7.5. Like all of our offerings, it is supported by our excellent support staff, and built upon our proven infrastructure.

Our goals for creating this product were simple. Make it flexible, easy to use, highly available, secure, reliable, and PCI compliant. In the next few days we’ll keep posting more details on the features that we’ve built to accomplish those goals.

In the meantime, we’ve opened up a private beta for our existing customers. Shoot an e-mail to support@maximumasp.com with your account id and we’ll get you a beta account created. If you are a software vendor that would like to verify that your application is compatible with our environment, let us know and we can get an account built for you. We definitely want to make sure we support as many applications, frameworks and libraries as possible.

For a quick preview of MaxESP, check out this overview video.

MaximumASP is excited to announce the  roll out of Microsoft’s just released Web Platform Installer (Web PI)  to all of our Dedicated server and MaxV customers. So what is Web PI? It is a really cool tool Microsoft developed making it super easy to download, install and keep up-to-date with the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer. Additionally, you can install popular open source ASP.NET web apps with the Web PI.

The Web PI really takes the guesswork out of dependencies for applications and where they need to be found for download. To start using it all you need to do is double click the link on your desktop.

Check out our  short 2 minute video demonstrating how easy it is to use! You can also read Microsoft’s blog announcement.

What's Inside?

	Popular Web Apps Install free popular ASP.NET and PHP web apps such as DotNetNuke and WordPress.
	.NET Framework Install the latest version of the .NET Framework. This includes everything you need to work with ASP.NET.
	IIS and Extensions Install the latest version of IIS, including latest IIS Web extensions like IIS Media Services.
	SQL Server Install the latest version of SQL Server 2008 Express. This includes both the database engine and tools.
	Visual Web Developer Install the latest version of Visual Web Developer Express, Our full featured free web development tool.
	Extra and Goodies In addition to everything above, the Web PI also includes the latest community version of PHP for Windows.

If you've logged in and seen our new bandwidth UI, you've probably noticed a new piece of data labeled "95th percentile." One of the new features of the new bandwidth system is tracking bandwidth by megabits per second (mbps). For our higher bandwidth customers, this method can be used instead of tracking based on the total amount of data transferred.

To gather this data, we take a sampling every five minutes which will give us a roughly 8,640 readings per month. We use this data to figure out how much of our pipe you are using and then bill you on that value. To get this reading, we take the 95th percentile of the data. This is also called Burstable billing.

The 95th percentile gives us a value which roughly tells us that 95% of the time, the usage is below this amount. What we do is take all of the data we gathered up over the month and sort it. We then take the top 5% of the values and throw them out. The highest value that is left becomes your billable utilization.

The advantage for the customer is that the peak values are thrown out. Many of our higher bandwidth customers use a steady amount of bandwidth, but periodically they need to burst up. Let's say, for example, every morning at 8:00 am you need to replicate many gigs of data from your local servers up to the web servers hosted at MaximumASP. This process only takes about 30 minutes. With burstable bandwidth, we’ll allow you to get as much bandwidth as needed to accomplish this process as possible. And, as long as this temporary spike in traffic accounts for less than 5% of the total data, we won’t penalize you.

For customers receiving our Tier 1 or Tier 2 weekly and daily backups, you'll now find a new tab on your dedicated server page. With this page you can track the status of your backup jobs in addition to the amount of disk space you are using against your allocation quota.

One of the new features on the page is the graphical history of each backup job. Here's a sample chart:

You'll notice that when the first job ran, it consisted of new files to be backed up and a number of "RFE files" or "redundant file eleminations." The next day more new files were added to the files from the previous day's job. After that day, since there weren't many new files being added to the server, we see that the majority of files being backed up daily for the rest of the month are identical to those on the previous day.  Only a small percentage of files being backed up are considered RFE files.

RFE files are files that already exist on our backup cluster. Files such as the windows system files only need to get backed up once for all users of the backup cluster.  Furthermore, they do not count against your backup quota for your server. RFE combined with HLZS data compression drastically reduces the time required to perform backups.  The use of RFE files also reduces the amount of space required to store your backups.

For more information on how our Backups work we have a KB article on how MaximumASP Dedicated Server Backups work.

Please be aware that, for some customers, there will be some missing report data around the 12th of September. The reporting data was lost while moving the data to our production environment.  This action did not affect your backup jobs.

MaximumASP has recently been featured in case studies by Microsoft and Dell for our work with Windows 2008, SQL 2008 and the new virtualization technologies.

• Dell Hardware
• Microsoft Virtualization
• Microsoft Windows 2008

For customers who have shared databases, you can now create new databases on our SQL 2008 servers. Back in November, we were the first to offer SQL 2008 hosting in conjunction with with Dell, Intel, Microsoft and the Professional Association for SQL Server so we've been looking forward to being able to roll out SQL Server 2008 into our production environment for quite some time.

To create a new SQL Server 2008 database just login to the MaximumASP Account Center, go to your database screen and choose Add New Database. You'll now be able to choose between a SQL 2005 or a SQL 2008 database.

The External DNS system at MaximumASP has been replaced with a new system of hardware appliances based on the BIND nameserver software. The appliance vendor of choice for this solution is Infoblox,one of the industry's leading companies in DNS infrastructure and management as well as security for core network services.

The Infoblox DNS solution replaces our old DNS servers which were running Microsoft DNS on 64-bit Windows 2003 servers. The decision to replace this critical part of our network infrastructure was made a number of months ago following a series of DNS related outages. We were simply outgrowing the capabilities of Microsoft DNS.

BIND based software is a comfortable fit for our external DNS that offers us the performance and uptime our customers are accustomed to having. To further our commitment to performance and uptime, the decision was made to use a network appliance solution and place management of DNS with our netops department. This decision placed priority on the security of our external DNS in addition to performance.

Of the appliances considered, the Infoblox family of boxes met - and in many cases exceeded - all our needs. The solution provided the functionality we required, a flexible solution architecture, a short migration path, a knowledgeable and responsive technical support base and a thorough attention to security.

As we were wrapping up our final tests on the new system, posts all across the industry spoke of the DNS vulnerability identified by Dan Kaminsky in early July. Because the code update was already available from Infoblox when we first caught wind of the vulnerability, our solution went live with the patch in place. Now, granted, the possibility of that vulnerability affecting our external DNS was low. However, the fact that Infoblox was prepared before the public-at-large knew about the problem convinced us that we made the right choice.

Since putting the new system in production, the days of our public DNS servers needing weekly reboots and experiencing other "mini-disasters" related to server performance and software limitations, our netops now boasts DNS uptime in terms of months (soon to be years) and DNS problems have been cut down to almost nothing. In fact, this all comes to fruition without any of our Microsoft Certified engineers needing to learn a single BASH command.