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I currently have four blogs that uses Wordpress running on a shared hosting company. This blogs have a considerable amount of visits and I'm constantly receiving warnings from the hosting company saying that I'm consuming too much server CPU.

Considering the fact that I have a dedicated server in another company with plenty of idle resources (it has a quad core Xeon 2.5GHz and 8GB of Ram and run on Win2008) I'm planning to move the blogs to this server in order to have some more freedom. I'm currently using this server to host some web applications using ASP.Net and SQL Express.

I've installed a blog to test and it worked fine, but some issues appeared and raised some questions in my mind:

  1. How to properly set the permissions in the folders used by wordpress plugins, I mean, what permissions should I set for the IIS_User in some folders so that the plugins works correctly?
  2. What's the best caching plugin to use considering this is a Window Server? In the previous hosting company I used the WPSuperCache, but it was a Linux Stack.
  3. Or should I ignore the caching plugins and use the Dynamic Caching Feature of IIS7?
  4. How can I optmize the MySQL server running in this server (specially the settings regarding memory and caching)
  5. How can I protect the admin folders against hacker attacks?

I know some people will advice me not to run Wordpress in a Windows stack, but that's my only choice. I don't even know were to start managing and LAMP stack, don't have the time to do so nor the money to rent another server.

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How about some answers:

  1. ACL Settings for Wordpress on IIS (link broken - see original blog post contents below)
  2. Windows Cache Extension for PHP
  3. Don't ignore caching, just use what's recommended for IIS
  4. The default installation settings for mySQL work fine for small to medium sized Wordpress blogs. You might look over these installation tips for a step-by-step install process.
  5. How to secure Wordpress admin directory on IIS is one option.

I have been running Wordpress on my IIS server for some time without any issues. Drop me a note if you have any further questions.

Original blog post contents (retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20100326200206/http://www.dscoduc.com/2009/11/acl-settings-for-wordpress-on-iis on 2014/11/10):

ACL Settings for WordPress on IIS

After getting my WordPress blog I wanted to ensure that my file ACL’s were configured correctly. This process is a little different than configuring BlogEngine.NET because WordPress runs using impersonation instead of a separated service account and anonymous account.

Unfortunately there was added complexity I upgraded my web server to use Windows 2008 R2 which has the latest version of IIS, version 7.0. Improvements to IIS 7.0 include a fundamental change to the way identity is managed. Specifically, IIS 7.0 uses two special accounts that didn’t exist in previous IIS versions: IUSR and IIS_IUSRS.

More information about these special accounts can be found over at IIS.NET on an article titled Understanding the Built-In User and Group Accounts in IIS 7.0.

So the goal was to configure the bare minimum level of access needed to run the blog. To assist in this effort I spent time with Sysinternals Process Monitor to watch for ACCESS DENIED messages as I browsed the blog and performed administrative tasks.

I started by removing inheritable permissions at the root folder. Next I removed all accounts except for the two core accounts that are required to manage the folder: SYSTEM and Administrators. Next I granted READ and LIST_FOLDER permissions to IUSR and IIS_IUSR at the root folder. With inherited permissions enabled by default on sub-folders this ACL would propagate down the folder tree.

If I stopped here I would be able to serve up content but would be unable to modify plugins and upload posts with attachments. I wanted all of the blog features to work so I modified the permissions of the wp-content folder by adding MODIFY access for IUSR account which grants MODIFY and WRITE access.

After the last ACL setting I checked the blog and found everything working correctly. After all was said and done I only needed to configure ACL’s in two places, the root and the wp-content folder:

  • c:\inetpub\wordpress
  • c:\inetpub\wordpress\wp-content

UPDATE: After I wrote this post I decided to remove the write access to the /wp-content folder except when I needed to update a plug-in. Additionally I needed to grant write access to the /wp-content/uploads folder in order to support blog posts with attachments and images.

I also discovered that additional write permissions were needed at the root level whenever I wanted to perform an automated update of the WordPress core files, something I also can manually grant whenever an update is required.

In the end the only rights left on for the IUSR account is the read/list permissions for the website root (which inherits down through the site folders) and read/list/write permission on the uploads folder.

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  • Your blog post had disappeared, so I took the liberty of hunting it down and adding it to your answer here.
    – kevinmicke
    Nov 11, 2014 at 2:42

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