Asymptomatic

Man, this week has been difficult. We've had a few server issues with work clients, and I've been playing around with my own servers, and it's just been a mess that I'm hoping will be in the past come next week. But I've learned some lessons, and I figure I might as well pass them on because people are apparently still buying hosting from really bad places.

What do I need? This is the most basic question you need to start asking yourself before you even hunt for hosts. Having some idea of your demands, both from a technical perspective and a logistical perspective can save you some pain in the future. Here are some really basic considerations:

Shared/VPS/Dedicated -- What level of hosting you choose will depend on the types of service you intend to run and the affordability of storage space. Shared hosting is for small, single, low-traffic installations, like a single blog or a low-traffic forum. VPS hosting allows you to interact with the server configuration directly, to host more complex applications and more of them. Dedicated hosting gives you full control over what runs on your system, plus often includes dedicated storage that is many times what you'd get from the other options. But there are more things to consider....

I'm taking on some more server-management related responsibilities for work, and I'm trying to be a little proactive with getting things under control so that I still have time to code. One thing that I would like to do is have a server configuration that we can standardize on so that when something goes wrong on a server we have many benefits.

The advantages of having a pre-configured system are that we'll have a way to set up a server again quickly that we know will work with the software we already have on the system. If something goes wrong with one of them that is related to the system settings, we'll know what we need to fix on all of the servers to make them right, not guess at whether the fix needs to be applied to each.

The process of standardizing allows us to pick the tools that we want to be on the system without having to rely on them being provided by a host. This gets particularly hairy when we try to build tools on a hosted environment and we're not sure what other tools might be on the system that could be affected or affect the tool we're trying to build. There are too many questions....

I've been part of the top-secret beta program over the past month or so of Microsoft's new Home Server product, and since it's now been released CTP, I can finally talk about it.

The software is actually really cool in concept. You basically allocate a box as your "home server". Many of us are getting so many computers around the house that it's becoming impractical not to have a dedicated server machine for sharing files and running printers, so it's a good idea to offer software that helps automate some of those tasks.

The Microsoft Home Server software looks like a kind of stripped-down version of Windows 2003 Web Server, but with a few dedicated applications for interacting with your home network. You access the main control portions of the Home Server via a "Terminal Services"-like client. It only allows you to connect to your Home Server, and does not provide you access to the Home Server OS, but a dedicated Home Server control application. When sitting at the Home Server system itself, you have access to a very pared-down version of Windows Server....