Windows 2003 Platform
As part of our ongoing commitment to always making the latest technologies available to businesses of all sizes at an affordable cost (starting at only $9.95/month), LFC Hosting fully supports Windows 2003 with IIS (Microsoft® Internet Information Server) 6.0 at no additional cost with the same award-winning control through our proprietary LFC Control Panel. Windows 2003 with IIS 6.0 offer significant advantages over competing services still using older versions (Windows 2000 & IIS 5.0).
Among these advantages are enhanced Windows, IIS 6.0 security, better reliability, and improved performance and efficiency.
Moreover, in accordance with LFC Hosting's all-inclusive approach, we are unique in seamlessly offering full support for Windows-native capabilities like ASP, .NET 3.5 (+ ASP.NET), ODBC and SQL Server 2008 as well as UNIX/Linux-native technologies and scripting languages like PHP, Perl, Python, MySQL 5, and Apache-style .htaccess directory-based password protection with the same hosting plan!
How is this possible?
Although our network is built on Windows NT/2000/2003 and IIS 5.0/6.0 in the foreground, over half of our network is actually UNIX/Linux-based. Windows/IIS servers are employed in the foreground to ensure optimal performance and stability of Windows-native capabilities (which typically only work well under Windows), as well as an increased level of security over a single platform. Then, "redirectors", router "port forwarding" and proprietary LFC technology "forward" all requests for UNIX/Linux-specific technologies (ex: MySQL 5 databases and Tomcat JSP/Servlets) to the appropriate Linux server clusters in the background!
LFC Hosting also takes full advantage of Linux's inherent network stability and performance by using it for all of our key network services, such as our load-balancing and fault-tolerant LVS directors/routers, disaster recovery systems, network monitoring and event handling systems, e-mail servers, backup system, proprietary Control Panel, etc.
This process is transparent to you and your website visitors, but effectively achieves the best of both worlds. Thus, if you traditionally required a UNIX/Linux-based host, LFC Hosting is still the right choice!
Advantages of LFC
We are experts in shared web hosting on Windows 2003, and have invested a significant amount of research and development into improving and tweaking Windows 2003 to offer improved security, reliability, performance and user isolation over a standard installation in a shared hosting scenario. For example, we developed software that takes a bare-bones Windows 2003 server and automatically turns it into a fully functional web server in under an hour! This technology ensures that all the settings required to optimize a server's stability, security, reliability and performance are integrated into every server we set up (more info).
Additionally, a new feature of IIS 6.0 called "App Pools" enables every web application to run in complete isolation. LFC Hosting has taken advantage of this feature to better isolate customers on the same server, ensuring that another customer's code and scripts do not impact the reliability of your web presence! Furthermore, as part of our ongoing commitment to provide optimal performance and reliability, we also employ FastCGI, which reuses processes to enhance the performance of PHP on IIS making it extremely effective for production purposes.
Finally, we have fully integrated our Windows 2003 servers into our state-of-the-art 24x7 network monitoring system – Nagios, which monitors each server for optimal operation at all times. In the event that a problem occurs, Nagios attempts to correct it while also immediately notifying a technician 24/7.
