Reasonable Location to Install Web Service on Server

Question

Firstly, I'm a software developer and not qualified as any kind of system or server expert so I'm looking for advice in order to help me prevent faults on our server.

I've written a modular system to carry out certain tasks for us autonomously to prevent us from writing the same old code over and over again. This consists of a Windows Service (.NET), a Web Service (WCF), a shared Class Library, and a Database which will run on a Windows Server 2003.

The problem comes, for me, in deployment. Specifically the web service - naturally the local service (and required shared library) are persisted (by default and convention) in the Program Files folder, but storing the web service here just seems absurd to me (even though we'd lock it down to appropriate use only).

Should the files be stored some place else all together? Or split them up and store the web service elsewhere?

Answer 1

It doesn't really matter where you put them so long IIS can access them. Putting them in the Program Files folder is perfectly fine. It's probably more common, however, to put the files in a folder underneath the IIS doc root.

On a side note, as a system administrator I like to have the option of specifying myself where to install things so if you write an installer for this you should allow that option during install.

Answer 2

My personal feeling is that this kind of thing should be put in its own folder tree, because that just simply makes management far simpler and less error prone. If you place it within the "normal" path and lock down the permissions there's always a risk that someone at a later stage, perhaps trying to sort out some other problem, changes permissions and the changes propagate to your tree, which would be most undesirable.

Answer 3

Personally I would put the web components in their own directory under C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\websitefolder to make it easier to manage, secure, etc.