Hosting recommendations

In this section you can learn about the hosting settings that we recommend, depending on the size of your production environment.The following sections reflect the minimum system requirements we recommend and you are free to decide on your own environment infrastructure, for example, shared hosting, dedicated servers, and so on.

The recommendations in this section are based on:

• Size of the production environment
  Size is categorized based on number of websites, content items, pages, and site traffic.
• The expected memory and CPU usage from the applications.
• SQL server statistics – recommendations regarding SQL server CPU and memory usage.

Hosting considerations

Consider these points when using hosting services:

• Hosting companies generally offer usage from shared server, so you need not to worry about the server machine.
• Generally, hosting companies allow you to use a specific amount of resources, for example, 500 MB storage and 2 GB of the database. What you should consider, however, is how much of the physical CPU resources you can actually use since on a shared server you have a limitation over the CPU resources. For example, you might have a 5% CPU usage limit and when you go over this limit, your application pool gets recycled.
• For dedicated servers, such as Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, and others, we recommend that you consider requesting availability of the entire hardware.
• In addition, there are variations in the service and prices when you consider having two or more websites on the same server. One of the sites may be an internal application or portal that does not require a lot of resources

General recommendations

• Enable both static and dynamic compression modules for IIS.
• In domain environment, always run the application pool with Domain Account.
• Set idle time-out option of the application pool to 0.
• Set Pool recycling regular time interval (minutes) to 0. By default, the time interval is 1740.
• Leave the Enable 32-bit applications property to false.
• For security reasons, always remove Users and Creator Owner from the website folder’s ACL.
• Grant the application pool identity user with Read permissions. For the AppData folder, set the permissions to Modify.
• HDD sizes in the recommendations are the recommended minimum. In addition, the assumption is there are no other services installed and IIS logging is either disabled or there is a cleanup or archive script for old logs. If logging is used, additional space is required.
• In regard to SQL servers, you need to take into account and follow Microsoft® Best practices and recommendation for sizing, server options, and so on.
• In general, we do not recommend small and mid-size production environments for high availability purposes.