How to Run IIS-Hosted WordPress, DotNetNuke, High-Definition Media, and Web Apps on Amazon EC2

In my last blog on MaxESP, I talked about how Web hoster MaximumASP uses the free Application Request Routing IIS Web extension to power “elastic” scale for the MaxESP shared hosting service. As a Web server platform, IIS plays a role in many different types of Web hosting -- shared, dedication, and virtual dedicated.

The Amazon EC2 service is another hosting provider in the “cloud hosting” category that provides Windows-based hosting options (see the Windows AMI catalog). The IIS product team has put together four “community” images (eg, we maintain the images, versus Amazon maintaining the images) into AWS for Amazon EC2 customers looking to get up and running quickly with a pre-installed WordPress blog, a pre-installed DotNetNuke CMS, a dedicated server for high-definition media delivery (complete with a media player page and free media for testing), or a Web app hosting server (with the latest IIS extensions) that you can use as a publishing target for the newly released Visual Studio 2010. 

Screen

The “Full Development Web Server” option gives you a pre-configured, pre-installed Web server target for applications that can be published using the brand new publish feature in Visual Web Developer 2010. This new Visual Studio publish feature, well-described in this blog, uses the IIS extension Web Deploy under the hood to power a simplified publishing experience from the dev client to your target server. (FTP still works too.)

You can download Visual Web Developer Express 2010 (the free Web dev tool) to get your client set up. In order for the Web Deploy publishing experience to work, your target Web server needs to have Web Deploy on IIS7.x working – check with your hoster to make sure that support is there or use the Amazon EC2 Full Development Web Server image to try it out. Web Deploy is a free download for IIS 7.0 and later, with configuration documentation, so it’s easy for server administrators to set up.

For an overview of what’s new in Visual Studio 2010 for Web developers all-up, check out this summary of new features.

You can browse all the EC2 walkthroughs in IIS.NET’s Hosting the Microsoft Web Platform on Amazon EC2 section. If you are looking for more information about our community AMIs, check out this blog:

 

Thanks,

Mai-lan

No Comments