Archive for November 1, 2006

Microsoft & Zend have partnered up to improve PHP performance on IIS (yet again!). Today on Bill Staples blog he talks about the great improvements being made: http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2006/10/31/PHP-on-IIS.aspx and really goes in depth with a nice demo on performance improvements being made. He has some nice screen captures, etc.  

For me though, the best part is that they’ve released an preview ISAPI for IIS6 which is available for download here: http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=1000051. This is more than just a download link page.  They really give a nice intro into what FastCGI is and why it’s so cool. There’s also a step-by-step article on how to get FastCGI & IIS working together here: http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=2&subtabid=25&i=1207

As many know, I’m a big advocate of IIS & Windows based hosting. We’ve based our company on it and have operated on IIS now for 8 years.  I know that Microsoft is committed to the webhosting industry and providing a power webserver platform for us.  I also enjoy opensource software and like to run PHP based applications.  I know from my personal experience that PHP is both safe and stable and I feel running PHP on Windows/IIS is testiment to the power of IIS.  I also believe there are too many self proclaimed “windows hosting experts” that don’t understand the technology and don’t take the time or effort to investigate it and simply proclaim “PHP is opensource, opensource is bad! Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft”.   This is obvious from my earlier posts.  I really hope these guys wake up and smell the coffee.

But, if you still think it’s not safe to run PHP on Windows and still want to listen to those guys that say running PHP is going to eat up too many resources and cause problems for your ASP.net sites and that you should only run Microsoft products on Microsoft products? Then that’s ofcourse your personal choice. Personally, I think you’re just burying your head in the sand with them! Honestly, take a look at sites like hotscripts.com and freshmeat.net and look at all the PHP based applications that are there. There are so many well written quality opensource (and commercial too) apps available that you’re foolish to limit yourself and not make use of these.  As for me, I see this as Bill Staples (who’s title is: Microsoft’s Product Unit Manager for IIS), giving us a demo along side Andi Gutmans (one of the creators of PHP) of PHP running on Windows!  Let’s see that’s opensource on Microsoft! YES!

For the my friends that tell me I’m crazy for running IIS and should use Apache, here’s your beloved PHP endorsing IIS!

For my friends that tell me “no Microsoft only wants you to run ASP.net on IIS” here’s Microsoft endorsing PHP! (oh yeah! opensource!).

I’m sorry guys but Microsoft is committed to making IIS THE best webserver platform on the Internet and is embracing PHP to get there! So yeah,once again WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP) is anything but wimpy and I am really looking forward to the final updates. (Which Zend is making opensource). So repeat after me: “I host on Microsoft Internet Information Server and I’m proud of it!”