supa has a brand new web server, a Windows Server 2016 with IIS 10 which is currently (one of) the most robust server, both in security and performance issues available.
- The server runs as a VM (Virtual Machine) on Microsoft Azure
- About 20 web apps are running on the web server, inclusive save-energy.tips, the students' project website (WordPress).
- "The horses" (the working and interaction environment for students and teachers, more infos on teachingweb.org) are not on the new web server but all previous "horses" ("The horse 17, 18 and 19") and future "horses" are hosted by an Azure App Service Plan. The benefit of this approach is the easy handling, data safety, an infinite scalability, very low costs and the possibility of automating the process of creating new "horses" in the future.
- Quick Box: Our Research-Box (an API-Service) is now available for the students on "The horses" as well as on the project website save-energy.tips and here in this blog (try it - mark some text) , further information
- All our web applications obtained its own SSL certificate for an encrypted communication between your browser and the website. Due to the certificate authority Let's Encrypt it's now possible to get certificates for no money!
- Running WordPress (save-energy.tips) on a Window Server is still deemed to be a little like a "special case" but there is no reason not to do so. Admittedly there are some "helpers" for "easy installing" of everything that's needed to run a WordPress website on a Windows Server (p.ex. the cool Web Platform Installer) but in this case you will not get the latest PHP version, the most up to date MySQL Database Server, PHPMyAdmin & so on. So we decided to do it ourselves and I think it was worth the work as we are happy with the performance. There are some helpful hints to set up an environment to run a WordPress website on a Windows Server and IIS. When I find time I will share my experience and write a short post about it.
- We're operating and managing our e-mail server (hMailserver) now/new on a separate server (some work is still to be done).
We have more than 10 years work experience in managing Windows Server with IIS (Windows Server 2003, 2008/R2, 2012 and today 2016) and minor experience with Apache. We did hosting services for "customers with a project" and even operated & managed server and web applications for third parties. Today we are focused on our own projects but open-minded for interesting & useful experiments with others.