Host multiple websites from Web Server 2008 R2

Question

I am moving our company's website to a colo web server running Web Server 2008 R2. We will be looking to host multiple sites from this server that are for public/customer viewing as well as other applications for internal office use.

As I'm working through my thought process of hosting these multiple websites should I be looking at simply creating subdomains within my main website and let IIS 7 point to the appropriate location or should I use DNS to point to a different port on the IP address?

In addition, what steps would I need to go through to host the sites on a drive different from the system drive? I've included a 2TB RAID to build all web applications on but in my current experience I've only hosted those from the default wwwroot folder on the system drive.

Answer 1

I would recommend using the domain names you want for business needs, use one IP for the server, and letting IIS sort out the mess with bindings.

• Choose either mutliple domains (domain1.com, domain2.com) or sub domains (sub1.domain.com, sub2.domain.com) for each 'site'

• Create an IIS site for each domain or sub-domain ('site')

• Attach proper site bindings to the IIS sites

• Use the same IP for all sites in your primary nameserver record (or a VIP if you are using some load balancer)

As for the drives, IIS doesn't really care, just use directories and Virtual Directories to get things where they need to be for the site

Answer 2

First, DNS doesn't tell the browser what port to look for a site on, so you can toss that idea out. When you set up the sites in IIS just set the bindings for each site to use the domain or sub-domain that the site has been assigned in DNS, point them to the server's IP address, and let IIS sort out the requests as they come in. As for which drive the sites are on, IIS doesn't care as long as it's accessible to the user account IIS is using to allow anonymous access to the site. When you create the site just enter the path to the root folder and it will read the files from whatever path you specify whether it's on the system drive or not.