In Which I Get My Own IIS7

Thanks to our resident Hosting Geek: Jorke, I have an internet-facing Windows 2008 / IIS7 web site.

Yes, Jorke is a brave man.

After logging in via Remote Desktop and changing my password, it is off and away on this funny experience with Windows IIS hosting.

For the record, historically I have always developed/tested my PHP/MySQL sites on Windows: from 2000, via XP and now on Vista, I would install Apache, PHP and MySQL to provide a mirror to the eventual “web hosted” server in the cloud.

First step is to install SQLServer 2008: Express onto the server.

Second step, to ensure that FastCGI PHP is running. Thanks to the support of FastCGI in IIS7, this took a minute at most:

Thirdly, as I plan to use the open source Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP, installing the extension: php_sqlsrv.dll and wiring this to launch in php.ini (one line addition)

After testing with php_info(); , I can see I have a working internet-facing server install.

Now onward towards php.