General Advice on Installation

Which operating system is best?
The system runs on the Windows operating system. Most people move on to using a dedicated machine when they want to put their websites into 'production' but do their initial testing on their own Windows desktop. See our notes below on 'testing' .

Many small sites will be fine running on a Windows desktop edition, and that is where most people start. When you need to use a server edition of Windows is simply down to how busy you expect the service to be. Transferring (exporting) your sites from one server to another is a straightforward and painless task.

Production servers should be using a recent edition of Windows Server.

Where should the server be located?
Most people start by trialling the system on their own Windows desktop machine, and then rapidly move on to installing it on its own machine on the local network, or in a Cloud instance.

There is no requirement for the system to be on a dedicated machine, but common-sense tells you that is the sensible thing to do. You would certainly want to do that for any type of 'production' situation, where the machine is providing corporate functionality

Full-scale corporate or organizational deployment is normally done on a dedicated server at a hosting company. That ensures you have sufficient bandwidth and your server is in a robust environment, however if you have a robust Internet connection and spare server capacity then you can host yourself.

Real or Virtual?
The software can be installed onto either real or virtual machines.

Real or Cloud?
The software can be installed onto an Amazon Web Services AWS EC2 Windows Server Instance following the normal installation procedure.

Production Server location

Production server location often is decided primarily on cost.

Amazon EC2 (or other Cloud suppliers) provide an easy access, robust, reliable service. They are ideal for trials and initial use and have on-demand contracts - you only pay for what you use. They are also very good for low volume or low bandwidth applications.

There is a trade-off though. Cloud servers have no up-front set-up costs the hourly rates and bandwidth are more expensive than using a Dedicated or co-located server.

Once you have established a usage pattern you will then be in a position to see if it is more cost effective to stay with the Cloud or move to use a dedicated server elsewhere.