Checklist of tasks before going Live

[ASPDNSF Staff - Jon]

Yes, every web application needs a unique set of MachineKeys.

[bajjame]

Ours is set to 'AutoGenerate'. Is this bad? Should that be hard-coded?

[ASPDNSF Staff - Jon]

It's not optimal. You don't want your server to generate a new set of keys while you have shoppers on your site. They will all receive "Invalid ViewState" errors, and have to start a new session (re-login).

[bajjame]

Is it safe to do this now since the site has been up for so long?

[barney]

Jon/ASPDNSF Tech Support.

First of all, thanks for this post. I've been able to knock out most (1/2) of the items on the list except the following:
1) Enable HTTp Compression
2) P3P Privacy Policy
3) Re-compress product images (haven't looked at this one yet, 2 b honest)
4) Set-up redirects for non-www requests
5) Review robots.txt (not really sure what I need to do here)
6) set memory limit for AppPool (haven't looked at this one yet, 2 b honest)

It looks like most of the items mentioned above require that we have access to IIS, correct?

If so, I'm using an ISP (Applied Innovations) and have no way of administering IIS, how can I implement these items. In your experience, do you know if AppliedI is willing to handle these requests. Is it really worth the efffort?

For instance;
1) Enable HTTP Compression
- From the IIS snap-in, right-click on the Web Sites node and click on Properties
- Select the Service tab - Enable Compress application files
- Enable Compress static files
- Change Temporary Directory to the folder that you created above, or leave it at it's default
- Set the max size of the temp folder to something that the hard drive can handle. i.e. 1000.
- Save and close the Web Site Properties dialog

Note: The temporary compress directory is only used for static pages. Dynamic pages aren't saved to disk and are recreated every time so there is some CPU overhead used on every page request for dynamic content.

Create a Web Service Extension (WSE) etc, etc, etc



2) P3P Privacy Policy
Use Internet Services Manager within MMC to configure Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) to set custom header properties to pages, virtual directories, or entire Web sites. To enable P3P custom headers using Internet Services Manager to configure IIS. (NOTE: If you don't have access to your IIS instance or your ISP doesn't want to help you out, you can also add these HTTP Headers programmatically using an HttpModule.)

4) Set-up redirects for non-www requests
Under your parent domain in IIS, create another website with example.com as the host name and then right click on it> select properties> Select Directory> A redirection to a URL> enter http://www.example.com$S$Q> Select "Exact URL">Select "A permanent redirection"> click ok



My main question is; Can AppliedI, do this for me? or, because AppliedI was recommended to us for ASPDNSF, are they already doing these things?

Please let me know ASAP because I'm having my customer go live tonight (they are switching their live domain www.guitarhotline.com to the AppliedI hosting platform Nameservers).

Thanks

Jeff O'Connell
jboconne@iupui.edu

[Rex]

Paul Kimmel's article "De-Sludging ASP.NET Pages with PageAdapter" is a simple method for storing viewstate on the server if you can afford the memory. This will decrease the size of your pages and thus increase the speed at which they are served.

[lovelyreligious]

Jon/ASPDNSF Tech Support.

My main question is; Can AppliedI, do this for me? or, because AppliedI was recommended to us for ASPDNSF, are they already doing these things?

Please let me know ASAP because I'm having my customer go live tonight (they are switching their live domain www.guitarhotline.com to the AppliedI hosting platform Nameservers).

Thanks

Jeff O'Connell
jboconne@iupui.edu

did you find out if appliedi does this automatically .. we also use them for hosting aspdnsf ...?

[lovelyreligious]

Set a custom error page and enable custom errors

In the web.config file there is a "customErrors" element. When you are convinced that your site is working properly you should set customErrors to On and create a static .htm page to be shown to your customers when an error occurs on the site. This will A) prevent your customers from seeing an ugly .NET exception if an error does occur, and B) will prevent your site from disclosing potentially sensitive information about your hosting environment such as the database name (in the case of a SQL error) or disk path of your site.

Hopefully, your site will become better performing and be more secure by performing these 13 simple tasks.


Note By Dan: I added custom errors to Jon's list. This is an important, but often missed step when going live.

i set the custom errors element to on ... but exactly where to put the .htm page and how to i direct my site to point to that page when there is an error... ?

thanks in advance.

chris

i found the answer to my question ..

http://support.aspdotnetstorefront.c...barticleid=277

[Dbennett4995]

Where are the web.config files which you noted to change the debug mode in. I can't find this parameter.

[Rex]

web.config is at the root folder of the application