I wanted to give everyone a little insight into how bmonday.com is setup and what the underlying technologies are. There are not a whole lot of people running blogs using the combination I am, so I think it will be interesting to more than a few people.
The server is an HP Media Smart 475 with 512MB RAM and 2x1TB hard disks configured for data replication between them (it’s not RAID, it’s… something else). The OS is Windows Home Server (WHS). The server is protected by a Juniper SSG5 SOHO firewall that is responsible for NATing the inbound traffic in addition to its normal firewalling duties. HP just won Best of Show at MacWorld with the (Windows-based) MediaSmart platform. It’s that good.
The blog engine is subText, which is asp.net-based and runs fine on WHS. The underlying technology is IIS, of course, and SQL for the back-end database. IIS came pre-installed with WHS, but SQL had to be added. I am using HP’s bundled gallery software for the Image Gallery portion of the site (the gallery has a different IP for technical reasons, but it does actually arrive at the same WHS server as the blog). The photo sharing components are actually a pretty compelling reason to buy HP’s WHS solution over the others currently. There are not many photo gallery add-ins for WHS, and none of them seem as slick as the software HP is bundling with their WHS boxes.
There you have it. If you have questions feel free to contact me.