Keyvan Nayyeri

Today was a busy and tiring day for me because I started early morning with the process of upgrading Waegis database server to SQL Server 2008 and then upgrading its software to .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and after that, started to move Nayyeri.NET from our Windows Server 2003 VPS to my Windows Server 2008 servers on MaximumASP. By the way, I have written a short story about Waegis upgrade on its blog.

As you may remember, when I wrote about the official release of SQL Server 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, I described my plans to upgrade Waegis database from SQL Server 2005 to 2008 and apply some new features introduced in .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 to its codebase. I had written that MaximumASP is one of the few .NET hosting providers that has started a SQL Server 2008 offer as soon as its official release, so I contacted them and asked about the possibility of an upgrade and you can guess the response from one of the top two .NET hosters: they just told me that I can upgrade my database server but asked me to wait for a few weeks to let them examine all aspects of upgrade process on their testing environments.

Last week I received an email from MaximumASP sales person informing me about their readiness to proceed with the upgrade at my desire time but due to time zone differences I wasn’t available at home to take care about side-effects, so I hold the process until today when they kindly and professionally upgraded my database server to SQL Server 2008. I would really thank them for keeping up with this upgrade and reducing all the side-effects.

The other major changes for Waegis were, an update in the codebase to work with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and of course, the installation of UrlScan for an improved security as I’ll describe later in this post.

After successful upgrade of Waegis, I moved on to transfer Nayyeri.NET from our Windows Server 2003 VPS to my own Windows Server 2008 servers on MaximumASP. To be honest, I had a great experience with this VPS account for almost 1.5 years where we could host our sites with a dear friend and his small hosting company that could provide a fantastic experience for us (of course, I still have left our other sites there). But my main reason to move to my own servers was the security: as I wrote a short while ago, my blog (along many other ASP.NET sites and blogs) was overwhelmed by manifold DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, nonetheless my blog could not be affected seriously but I decided to apply more security mechanisms to make sure nothing goes wrong in the future. Scott and Phil already have written about their solution to defend these attacks by installing UrlScan and I also had the same plan that couldn’t implement it for a short while. Besides, as my blog traffic and visitors are growing, I wanted to run my site on a more isolated environment with a more a reliable hoster. One of my main strategies in development and hosting is, optimizing my code for 64 bit platforms and using these platforms to host my applications, so I had to move to new servers because my previous hosting solution was a 32 bit solution.

Finally I started to move my blog from the first server to the second one and it’s already finished but you may see my site on the new server after a while (though, all visitors see the most recent content without problems). Now Nayyeri.NET is hosted on 64 bit platforms powered by Windows Server 2008 x64 edition and SQL Server 2008 x64 edition. After moving my blog, I implemented UrlScan 3.0 for it to block service attacks easier, faster and with less cost.

Now that I’m going to finish the military service, I would have more time to spend on blogging, so stay tuned and see how I return back to frequent blogging like the past! To be honest, I feel very well with this movement and upgrade because I always love to keep my knowledge and works up to date with the most recent changes and this upgrade assures me that I don’t need to have any other movement for at least 2-3 years! Is there any hoster better than MaximumASP?!