• 05/31/2009 - 18 More Social Sites Added to SocialNetwork.in
• 05/25/2009 - Run Your Own Remix or Music Project at ArtistServer.com
• 05/22/2009 - AudioBoo.fm and YouNoodle.com Added to SocialNetwork.in
• 05/06/2009 - mp3tunes.com - no option to close your account
• 03/17/2009 - How to run a Remix Project
• 09/28/2008 - My Lovely Wife Lou is Pregnant
• 12/14/2007 - ArtistServer News and a new site: FreeMusicLicensing.com
• 09/18/2007 - AritstServer and ToneThis Serve Up Indie Ringtones
• 09/11/2007 - Running LightTPD and PHP on Windows
• 09/06/2007 - Compete.com -vs- Alexa.com - Comparing Website Rank

• High availability – Able to support a large number of simultaneous users
  
• Free – I can't afford to purchase solutions, and I'd like to move more into open source solutions
• Stable – While I am looking for mature solutions, I will try newer options if they look promising, but they need to be stable
• Focus on serving files – If possible, the soltuions will need to be ideal for serving files and supporting byte ranges (ffwd an mp3)
• Can Run on Windows – I'd like to move to linux, but I'm hesitant to change everything at once.

From the lighttpd Web site: http://www.lighttpd.net/

lighttpd is used by many well-known sites. The typical scenario is using lighttpd as off-load server to push out static content and leave to complex work to another server. One example is YouTube. They have a farm of servers which push out the thumbnails you see before you see the movies.

Security, speed, compliance, and flexibility--all of these describe LightTPD which is rapidly redefining efficiency of a webserver; as it is designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) LightTPD is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems. And best of all it's Open Source licensed under the revised BSD license.

light footprint + httpd = LightTPD (pronounced lighty)

For my specific case, I now have a test server setup with lighttPD and PHP, and have started working on a translation of my file serving/streaming/tracking code. Once I have the code up and running, I can start testing on linux server and consider removing Windows from the equation. Making a platform change would provide even better performance and a higher number of concurrent users. Why not do it now? Because I'm new to PHP and don't want to change all the elements at once. After I gain a comfort level with PHP, I can start working with it on linux.

Windows + LightTPD + PHP

1. Install Windows Server: I'm using Win2000 Adv Server. Remove all the items from the installer that you won't need on a server, like games, etc. Uncheck everything that deals with IIS, the mail server, and ftp. I suggest using other options for FTP. I don't know of a mail server to use, so if you must, install Microsoft's mail server.
   
   Once Windows is installed, run Windows update and reboot accordingly. Do this until you finally do not see any more updates. With Win2000 Server, I had to upadate 'Windows Update' then do a few updates, then about 54 updates, then another 9, then a few more... so it takes awhile.
2. Download: Now download all the software you'll need to run the server. In my case, this will include:
   • LigHTTPd for Windows: http://wlmp.dtech.hu/down_lighty.php?lang=en
   • PHP: http://www.php.net/
   • FileZilla Server: http://filezilla-project.org/
   • VNC: http://www.realvnc.com/download.html
   • Notepad ++: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
3. Install: VNC Server – for remote access, Notepad++ for editing config files, and FileZilla as your FTP server
4. Install LightTPD: I suggest installing to the root: C:\lighttpd
5. Install PHP: I suggest installing to the root: C:\PHP - during installation, you will be asked to select your server, select 'other CGI' as 'lighttpd' is not a listed option.
   
6. LigHTTPd Configuration – I'm using version: 1.4.18
   • Open the configuration file: C:\LightTPD\conf\lighttpd-inc.conf
   • Uncomment mod-cgi – just delete the '#' in front of it.
   • Uncomment mod-rewrite - same method, unless you don't need it
   • edit "index-file.names" leaving only: "index.php", "index.htm"
   • consider trimming the mimetypes down to what you would be serving
   • edit "static-file.exclude-extensions" - set to ".php" only
   • be sure to create a file for catching errors – uncomment this line after you create the file and save it at the root.: server.error-handler-404 = "/error-handler.php"
   • Uncomment cgi.assign, delete all but php, and add a slash: (".php" => "PHP/php-cgi.exe") to this: (".php" => "/PHP/php-cgi.exe")
   • Set LighTTPD up as a service – first, click on this exe file: C:\LightTPD\bin\Service-Install.exe When I tried this, the registry entries fail, so the next step is to edit the registry and add the keys by hand (or a .reg file). Be sure to replace the lighttpd installation directory with your own. Save the following as a .reg file and double click on it to merge these keys with your registry (if the service installer did not show an error, skip this step):
     Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
     
     [HKEY_Local_Machine\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LightTPD]
     "DisplayName"="LightTPD"
     "Description"="A fast, secure and flexible webserver - WLMP Project"
     "ObjectName"="LocalSystem"
     
     [HKEY_Local_Machine\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LightTPD\Parameters]
     "AppDirectory"="C:\\LightTPD"
     "Application"="lighttpd.exe"
     "AppParameters"="-f conf\\lighttpd-srv.conf -m lib -D"
     
     [HKEY_Local_Machine\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SharedAccess\Parameters\FirewallPolicy\StandardProfile\AuthorizedApplications\List]
     "C:\\LighTTPD\\lighttpd.exe"="C:\\LightTPD\\lighttpd.exe:*:Enabled:LightTPD (WLMP Project)"
   • At this point, you may need to stop/start the lighttpd server service – I use the Computer Management Console – and navigate to the Services icon, then the actual service.
   • In your browser's address bar, type: localhost – you should now see the default index page for lightTPD. If not, possibly the registry keys were not added correctly, or you made a mistake when editing the lightTPD configuration file.
7. PHP Configuration – I'm using version: 5.2.4
   • open the php.ini file: C:\php\php.ini
   • move the upload temp and session directories, and changed their references in the php.ini file:
     upload_tmp_dir="C:\php\upload"
     session.save_path="C:\php\session"
   • locate and set: doc_root ="C:\lighttpd\htdocs"
8. Test the server
   • create a new text file in the web root called index.php
   • type this into it:
     then save
   • in your browser's address bar, type: localhost
   • you should see the php info specs in your browser
9. Alternate Setup: Unfortunately, fastCGI on Windows either doesn't work, or doesn't work very well (at this point in time), which means it won't work with lightTPD. There are many other options for you to tweak and try in the configuration file, my only suggestion is to save a copy of this first version of your configuration file as a backup.
10. Finish:
    • Be sure to setup VNC and install a VNC client on your local PC/MAC if you don't have it already.
    • Setup FileZilla and make sure it's secure. I like to limit FTP access to my office's IP address only.
    • You may want to add a firewall, I like using BlackIce http://blackice.iss.net – but it's a bit expensive. Windows 2000 doesn't come with a Firewall, and you don't want to install one that is designed for a workstation.
    • More Info:
      http://trac.lighttpd.net/trac/
      http://trac.lighttpd.net/trac/wiki/Docs
      http://forum.lighttpd.net/forum/1

This information is offered for free and does not imply any responsibility nor consultation. If you have any questions, I'll do my best to answer, but I think the best thing to do is to post to the lighttpd forums.

Good luck in your developments, I'll post again once I have made some progress.

We are not allowed to disclose how many sites are assigned to each server however I can say we do allocate a set number of sites based on the specifications of the server and each configuration has been time/stress tested before it is deployed as a production server.

• This is not written on their site.
• This is not listed as a feature of their hosting packages.
• This is not listed in the Admin area where you manage your site.
• Apparently, not even the general support staff know about this limitation.
• If they kill off your processes, they don't inform you - you would have to discover that it is happening either on your own or if you are lucky, a user would inform you
  

HostMySite.com Support:
The timeout error that you are receiving is from a program that we run on our ColdFusion servers called SeeFusion. It is set to kill any cf process that runs longer then 50 seconds. SeeFusion was implemented to increase the stability of our ColdFusion servers, which it has done. The only way to avoid this timeout on a shared server would be to use a different method of uploading, like ASPupload. Alternately, you could go to a VPS.

If you have any other questions feel free to contact us.

ArtistServer has added a CAPTCHA challenge-response system to the various forms where people can either contact it's members or post replies to blog posts. With CAPTCHA, we can now block the multitude of spammers and spam bots who crawl the Web looking for Web forms.

The following text comes from: http://lyla.maestropublishing.com

What is a Captcha?

A Captcha is a type of challenge-response test used to determine whether or not a user is human. A common type of Captcha requires the user to enter the correct string of characters that have been distorted in an image. A Captcha can also be an response to a question that most people should be able to answer.

What does Captcha stand for?

Alan Turning described challenge-response tests in a paper he wrote in 1950. Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and IBM coined the term in 2000. Captcha is an acronym for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart." In 1997 Alta Vista developed the modern-day Captcha to prevent bots from adding URLs to search engines. The rest is history.

For those who want to know how I set this up, I used LylaCAPTCHA for ColdFusion - which is an open source project built from another open source project from: http://www.compoundtheory.com. In only took a few hours to add to integrate the code into the site and add to the various forms we needed it on.

Thanks goes out to: Peter J. Farrell and Mark Mandel - the developers of this CAPTCHA solution.

warning Unable to open C:\CFusionMX7\runtime/lib/license.properties

There is usually a warning in the coldfusion-out.log that says "warning Unable to open C:\CFusionMX7\runtime/lib/license.properties." This warning should be ignored.

If you have any feedback after trying it, or have some ideas on how DiffMerge could be used, contact me at http://www.markenmedia.com/.