Windows Hosting

[marke]

I have read about people having problems with the Actinic Digital Download system when running on a Windows server rather than a nix server. This sounded to me like it was a known problem. Could someone who knows about this sort of thing let me know whether, as a general rule, running Actinic on a Windows host is problematic or whether it just applies to sites which run digital downloads. Are there any other problems which are frequently encountered on Windows hosts other than with digital downloads?

Thanks

Mark
www.filofills.co.uk

[garyhay]

nix is IMHO easier to use with Actinic. Some hosts have setup Windows servers correctly to run Actinic but these are the exception not the rule.

[PA.com]

Hello Mark.
I selected a Windows NT host-server for my (digital download) site; having not seen any advice against it and persuaded by the fact NT supported ASP, Perl, CGI, media-streaming etc - all the things an Actinic Audio-Store needs to run. (btw Audio Store is Catalog v.7 with Digital Download enabled).

Now I don't know if my web-hoster is in a minority, but it seemed almost that they were totally unprepared for the fact that an Actinic site suddenly appeared at the door of their Windows NT server. This was surprising as they were one of the web-hosters Actinic recommends on their support pages. I received through a vague email with some instructions on how to configure the site within Actinic Configuration Wizard, and it failed to work almost immediately. It was only after four 20-minute phone calls to their support desk (very helpful people I must say) that anyone was able to set up the right directories in the right places on their server for me to start uploading the store. Grrr.

I know that sounds like a moan, but I had expected things to be much easier, and I have to say I think they would have been had I chosen Linux/Unix. The email instructions my hoster sent me were clearer for Linux than for Windows NT, and looking around their support pages, it seems than far more configuration support had been written with Linux in mind.

Then I had a further problem with getting Digital Downloads to work, but this is described in another post of mine (which I assume from your post that you've read).

All that said, my site does now run flawlessly (so far) on a Windows NT server, distributing digital download files wherever they need to go. So it CAN be done, and with good results. It's just it took a lot of effort and frustration and really got my goat boiling in the process. I'm pretty sure Unix could not be as much bother, but I'm no expert on the subject.

Good luck, Paul