PHP on IIS7 and Windows Server 2008 Pros and Cons
Background: I work for a small Microsoft based web developer who is slowly starting to do more work in PHP. As of today, we are running these sites (mostly WP) via IIS6 on Windows Server 2003, although this poses problems with fancy census etc.
We're at a stage where we can decide to upgrade our existing server to IIS7 on Windows Server 2008, which seems to have better support for running PHP and all that entails - OR - getting a Linux server.
As a developer, my preferred server is Linux, although the finance department is not too keen on paying for another server.
Q: Are you having serious problems hosting PHP on IIS7 on WS 2008 along with .NET applications? Are there specific technical reasons why we shouldn't use this setting?
Rated, Alex
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PHP on IIS is constantly being improved. I work for a web host, I can confidently say that you will not see any major problems continuing to run PHP on IIS.
In addition, PHP and ASP.NET applications never see each other or have no way to fight. This is because PHP scripts are executed in a separate process ( c:\php\php-cgi.exe
) spawned by IIS. ASP.NET code runs inside a worker process that is completely decoupled.
You should also make sure that you are using FastCGI support in IIS7, this gives PHP applications a significant performance impact (as in IIS6).
PHP applications in IIS can also indirectly use the managed pipeline features offered by IIS7. The following article may be of interest:
Enhance Your Applications with the Integrated ASP.NET Pipeline (MSDN Magazine)
Unless there is PHP code that is truly Linux specific, which is quite rare, I don't see the need to move to Linux.
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