For those of you who run IIS Web Servers did you know that you can for free install (in like 30 seconds) a free plugin that will allow you to take total control over compression for your web server.
Well there is a catch, you have to be non commercial, so that means most of you.
I personally have installed the IISxpress tool to my personal blog site that gets around 3000 hits a week.
This tool is free for non commercial web sites - and if you are commercial it is only $50 USD.
Have a look at my post on the tool and you can see live stats on my site as well.
Opps all most forgot the product is called IISxpress and the current BETA release ( 2.1 ) is very stable ( no problems at all ) in my testing, it supports (2000, XP, 2003, Vista and Longhorn). Their web site is http://www.ripcordsoftware.com/cs/files/default.aspx
My stats for a couple of days on my blog.crowe.co.nz site.
Well, nobody seems to be particularly interested in this Chris, but I’ll reply to confirm that this little utility is totally straightforward to install i.e. download, and click on install :). Once installed, it immediately starts saving you download bandwidth because every file that is served from your website is compressed.
Advantages:
Couldn’t be simpler to install
Saves you bandwidth (up to 75% compression in my experience, so if you serve 1GB of data, with this tool, this becomes as little as 250MB)
Speeds up end-user’s experience, because the file is smaller, therefore it is delivered faster
Free (for non-commercial use)
Seems like a “no-brainer” to me, so thanks for the tip.
Seems to work fine. I’ve got XP Pro (comes with IIS) and a cable connection, so I run my web server out of my house. For something as simple as my web site, IIS seems to be a lot easier to set up. I tried Apache, but it seemed harder to set up, and seemed to get hammered a lot more from the outside world than IIS. Probably nothing more than a configuration issue, but if you’re not a guru, then you go with what’s easier.
