windows server

[djferros]

I host my website with www.vi.net. They are meant to be quite big in England.

Once i bought the webspace I then bought actinic Business.
The site is hosted on a windows server which they now tell me cannot support actinic and i'd have to change to Unix. Is this correct? I know nothing about this sort of thing but it seems a bit weird that acompany such as actinic would create such a package..
________
Ds7

[Jan]

Actinic will run on a windows or unix server providing the host has the correct software running on the servers. So maybe they only run the software required for Actinic on their unix servers (I have been told that licensing is more expensive on windows machines so that could be a reason to do this).

Regards

[garyhay]

Jan

Are your servers NT as I thought they were Unix. The test space I required IMHO proved that Actinic is lousy on NT. Just posting to your space increased the speed on my site by at least 6 times.

Having now used other Unix space and switching clients I can assure you that V6 is much much better on Unix. I believe we lost 70% of customers from some clients sites after upgrading to V6 on NT with logs showing the majority giving up during checkout.

Our NT ISP has all the correct settings and modules installed.

[Jan]

Hi Gary,

I think that you are mixing me up with someone else because I haven't got any servers - that is an interesting post though because my site is hosted on windows (by slowhosts) and has just been moved over to super fast, ultra reliable servers, which - using the rule of catch22 - in reality means that the site is now running really slowly (FHs support say - oh no it isn't, and the pantomine begins), maybe I should think about moving to a unix machine.

Interestingly enough I put my site up onto onto a Harlequin server and it was at least 5 times faster than my current site. I was testing my multisite mole (uploads catalogs/downloads and processes orders for all of your sites in turn) so I was placing test orders on my site and the test site I had set up and it was clearly much faster - I think that they are windows servers as well - but could be wrong.

Presumably if I move to unix I won't be able to use ASP anymore?

Regards

[garyhay]

Sorry Jan I was thinking of Jo from Pinbrook.

See this link http://wwws.sun.com/software/chilisoft/index.html about ASP on Unix.

Also this is in script bb0000xx.pl

#
# NT systems rarely execute the CGI scripts in the cgi-bin, so attempt to locate
# the packages in that case. This may still fail if the cgi-bin folder is named
# something else, but at least we will catch 80% of the cases. The INCLUDEPATHADJUSMENT
# covers the remaining cases.

I think this could cause problems as my cgi-bin is always called _cgi on the NT servers. This looks to mean like the scripts on NT have a whole lot more work to do before they can even run the script.

I think what we need is something from Actinic covering this issue as it is getting mentioned every other day on the forum.

[pinbrook]

Gary

we run UNIX!

[TheBoyLard]

Evening Gary,
and so do we now!

*edit* Sorry Desmond - hijacked your thread. To be honest, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Actinic will run on either Linux/Unix or a Windows platform, generally that is not the issue with performance.
What does make a difference is how the server it's running on is set up, how many other sites are also sharing that server (you actually rent space on the server and share the resources of that box with potentially hundreds of other sites) and what the specs of the server are. We know through previous threads that V6 is particualrly demanding on memory when running Perl scripts (upto 16MB in some cases) and if you are sharing a 128MB server then you can see that performance is going to get hammered if there are busy sites on the same box as you. I think it's safe to say that Windows systems are not particularly clever when it comes to managing memory and resources.
I would always choose Linux for webhosting, you just cannot afford for your site to suffer an M$ moment, whereas the only time Linux tends to fail is because a piece of hardware has gone Pete Tong - usually a disk but a good host will have mirrored disks so if it happens your site is down for 45 secs. Also look for a host that uses Ensim s/w to manage the sites they host - it is THE tool to manage multiple sites on a server.
Best bet is to find a host who uses a good setup with good backend connections and lots of peering agreements - this way if part of the network falls down then at least you still stay online through using other networks.
*end of edit*
Actually it's Linux for us which is even better (although if you want performance, scalability and reliability, go Sun but be prepared for a real shock with prices! - I used to sell Sun but I'm much better now)
Linux/Unix all support various mods to compete with The Beast's offerings, asp support was an early issue but it's now included in all distributions of Linux and most Unix variants and is rock solid.
When I went shopping for a host last year my prime caveat was it must be Unix or Linux (proper Unix is expensive hosting, as the kit it runs on is generally proprietry) and I've been reasonably happy with them - only 2 days downtime in over a year due to 2 DDoS attacks, but now our bit is up that will move over next year when we come up for renewal.

Cheers

Andy.

[Jan]

Originally posted by Jan
Interestingly enough I put my site up onto onto a Harlequin server and it was at least 5 times faster than my current site.

I have just put my site up onto a
Pinbrook server, and again it is much faster than fasthosts, this one is unix BUT still has ASP. The pricing is competitive with fasthosts as well.

Regards