Building the AnandTech Staging Environment

Over the years, we've had various hardware setups for the staging server at AnandTech. For the most part, it had been running off my personal web server, since ColdFusion is quite easy to develop from anywhere because of its scripting language roots. For the new .NET architechture for AnandTech, I performed all development on my local machine due to the simplicity of local debugging with Visual Studio .NET (it's geared for local host development, especially debugging). The problem that I ran into is mostly a limitation of Windows XP - its limit of 1 website. That is, you can only create one website in Windows XP's IIS. There are a few hacks out there to work with multiple projects or websites, like IIS Multiplex, but none of these available hacks or work-arounds can really replace an unrestricted version of IIS.

The reason for requiring multiple websites is that there are several key projects that make up the AnandTech back end. The main AnandTech .NET project is the largest project; it contains the entire website (www.anandtech.com) front end code and back end API. Next, we have the Ad tracking engine that is a .NET port of our old ColdFusion-based FuseAds ad engine. The rest of the projects are all ColdFusion- based, as they are mostly form interfaces to our database for reporting purposes. We have a statistics site that analyzes our home-grown, database-driven web statistics engine, and the AnandTech Admin site (allows the Editorial Staff to post and edit their content), which is a home-grown CMS. Each of these projects are separate websites.