There are many great monitoring solutions that inform you whenever a server goes down. My favorite free monitoring tool is The Dude. The problem with these tools is that you have to run them on one of your corporate servers. Therefore, you won’t realize whether your website is unavailable on the Internet because of a faulty firewall configuration or external networking problems.

To make sure that your website is available not only on the intranet but also on the Internet, your monitoring solution has to be outside your organization’s network. This is where web monitoring services come in. They are not expensive, and some of them even have free plans. In this post I compare three free website monitoring services: SiteUptime, HostTracker, and BasicState.

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Yesterday, I blogged about Windows Azure, which is one of the four components of the Azure Services Platform. Today, I will give a short introduction to the other services and share my opinion about their significance for Windows administrators.

The four services of the Azure Services Platform are: Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services.

Windows Azure

As I outlined yesterday, the term “Windows Azure” is a bit misleading. Essentially, Windows Azure is a cloud-based Web platform. Even though it is running on Windows Server 2008, it is not a cloud-based Windows edition. Perhaps this might change though. David Chappell mentioned that Microsoft might support unmanaged code on Windows Azure in the future. Perhaps this is a hint that non- web-related applications will one day run on Windows Azure. Then it could be possible that we can move our complete Windows backend to Microsoft’s datacenters.

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Most journalists were quite surprised when Microsoft announced its new cloud initiative Azure some days ago at the PDC 2008. I have read quite a few articles about this topic and it seems to me that most writers have problems in understanding what Azure really is. This explains why some of the articles contradict each other. I must admit that I still don’t understand it completely myself. The complexity of Microsoft’s new cloud platform is already amazing. All of the articles I have read have one thing in common, though. They all make us believe that a revolution is going on. In this article, I will try to clarify what Windows Azure is and what it is not.

There are quite a few fundamental concepts related to Microsoft’s cloud initiative: Azure Services Platform, Windows Azure, .NET services, Live Services and SQL Services. The most interesting question is how these relate to each other. Some journalists seem to believe that Windows Azure is the fundamental platform and all the other services run on top of it. This picture is supported by the following diagram, which can be found in many articles.

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Zone-h published a new statistics report about registered attacks. In 2007, Apache websites were defaced 319,439 times whereas IIS sites (IIS 6.0 + IIS 5.0) were attacked only 137,599 times. Of course, one has to take into account that there are (still) more Apache sites out there. So, I used the latest Netcraft data to calculate what I call the Apache/IIS website security ratio.

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It is always interesting to see how various kinds of statistics of Web server market shares come to totally different results. This leaves room for everyone to choose which statistics just suits them best or is to their own liking [1] [2]. In this post, I compare four prominent statistics (Netcraft, Google, Port80, Security Space) with respect to the market shares of IIS and Apache.

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Infoweek reported about the new Netcraft data. Apache now hosts 48.4% and IIS 36.2%. Netcraft calculated that Microsoft might catch up with the Open Source web server in 2008 if IIS will continue to gain ground in this pace.

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Mark Wilson installed Apache on Windows Server 2008 Server Core and it seems to work without problems. All you have to do is to run msiexec /i apache.msi. Now, you might ask why Microsoft made IIS available on Server Core if Apache works, anyhow. I mean, you can’t use ASP.NET on Server Core. So if you want more than just static HTML pages you have to work with PHP or another solution for dynamic web pages.

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Never trust a statistics you didn’t forge yourself. This piece of unquestionable wisdom came to mind when I recently read about a statistics from Google “showing” that IIS servers host more often malware than Apache web servers. An interesting InfoWorld article discusses the validity of these statistics in the light of another study revealing that about 9,000 sites hosted by IPOWER attempt to install malware on visitors’ computers.

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Microsoft released the June CTP for Windows Server 2008. Almost 1000 bugs have been fixed. Most notable is that Server Core includes IIS7 now. I’ve been blogging about it when MS announced that they are going to support IIS7 on Server Core. I want to take this opportunity to correct my earlier assessment regarding this move. I have serious doubts now that it makes much sense.

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It seems as if Microsoft upgraded its Web servers to IIS7. This Netcraft report indicates that they made the upgrade on June 8^th. You can check it out yourself by using an HTTP header viewer. It is interesting to note that they run IIS 7.0 on Windows Server 2003. I didn’t even know that there is an IIS 7 version for Win2k3. It is quite courageous to use beta software for Web servers having to cope with such a traffic load. They are not brave enough to run it on Windows Server 2008, though.

Microsoft just announced that Windows Server 2008 Server Core will be able to run IIS7 (Internet Information Server 7.0) as a server role. This isn’t yet possible with Server Core Beta 3 which I am currently testing. It only supports typical Intranet roles like file server, DHCP, and Active Directory Services. Interestingly, Microsoft added this new role due to customers’ demand.

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Some bloggers [1] [2] gave the impression that Internet Information Server overtook Apache. According to a press release of Port80, IIS 6.0 passed Apache for the first time. In my view, however, this data doesn’t say much about the market shares of Apache and IIS.

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