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My company is planning one new big web app.

We are expecting around 250K hits per day in the first month.

I'm used to work with large traffic sites, but using Apache and Lighttpd, etc.

But for this project the client want .NET to be the tool. So I'm really sceptic about IIS as Webserver.

What is your advise? Use IIS? How to scale IIS? Is it possible do handle this amount of Traffic? The versions of IIS in Windows 2003 are diferent from the ones in Windows 2008?

Regards,
Pedro

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You'll probably want to go with Server 2008 since that has IIS7. Don't buy the FUD about IIS. When was the last time you heard about microsoft.com being down?

Poke around on the netcraft.com site and you'll not be skeptical anymore.

Here is a great resource about what's coming up in the Web Farm Framework for IIS 7 that has to do with scaling, load balancing, and provisioning.

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theregister.co.uk/2004/06/15/akamai_goes_postal - 2004? Also, longest running systems != highest throughput systems. That said, .NET? Yes, IIS. – John Barrett Aug 11 '10 at 17:30
"what's coming up in the Web Farm Framework".... its always the next upgrade that Microsoft sells you :) – gbjbaanb Aug 11 '10 at 18:58
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250,000 a day could mean 3 requests per second or could mean different things. I've seen single servers running IIS handle more than 30,000 requests per second for static files, and it was not a huge server (8 cores, 8gb, etc). I would look at how many requests per second you are looking to handle (peak). And the big thing is how your application is implemented. If you need more servers Web Fram Framework will definitely help you manage that, and by the way it is free. – CarlosAg Aug 11 '10 at 21:35
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up vote 1 down vote

The answer here is yes use IIS for a .NET hosting project .... you can see how stack overflow is configured here http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflow-built-with/

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up vote 1 down vote

250k hits is a fair number. You'll need more than IIS or Apache to make it work - mainly expertise. Anyone can bring up a webserver and run it, but to run it well you need the experience of all its foibles (and you'll think IIS has more than most if you come from a *nix background).

eg. Slashdot serves 4 million pages per month, and they have a large infrastructure. You're looking to be a fifth the size! So whilst IIS can do it, the bigger question is whether you can do it. You'll need to learn a lot of brand new technologies and chances are your solution will not be as good as the stuff you're used to, it'll also take you a lot longer.

So, if I was a businessman selling this, I'd try to make them change their minds - show them your existing customer sites, example data from large systems, inform them of the risks in a new platform. Its not as if you can't do the work in a non-.NET toolset, its not as if there are very few web devs who don't know .NET, there's little reason to go with it, in this case.

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You are comparing apples to oranges. Page hits (250k according to OP) is NOT THE SAME AS page views. So he isn't technically going to be a "fifth the size" of /. – GregD Aug 11 '10 at 19:25
ah yes, good point. Still, he did say 'per day in the first month', I suppose its only going to get more popular over time, not less. – gbjbaanb Aug 12 '10 at 10:45
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