Virtual Hosting on SBS

Virtual hosting of multiple web sites is just one of the ways you can realize more value from your SBS investment. More importantly, it is a business tool that can help you better communicate with your customers with just a few quick steps.

This guide is written for the small business owner with the small business concerns in mind. I will walk you through the setup of your DNS (Domain Name Server), IIS (Internet Information Server), FrontPage and SharePoint Team Services of Windows Small Business Server 2003. While this guide is plenty to get you going, please consult with a trusted IT specialist that can give you additional points to consider.

Hosting Overview

To give you an idea of what you're actually about to do let me give you some basic information on the SBS Server. Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 is a small business bundle of servers tied together with easy to use wizards and maintenance scripts built in. The standard edition comes with everything you need to run a web site, mail server, SharePoint team site. I'm about to show you how that server can be used to host multiple web sites that serve different business identities and different business objectives.

You need to have a functional network and Internet access with a static IP address (check with your ISP to make sure you do not have a dynamic IP address that changes often). You will also need to have port 80 open on your firewall and pointed to your SBS server. To simplify what I just said: If you can get to your Outlook Web Access from home you're in great shape.

Guide Goals

The following will help you configure three additional web sites for another business your company is starting. These sites will be:

• www.vladville.com - main public web site for the "new" business.
• team.vladville.com - private SharePoint team site for my emplyees.
• extranet.vladville.com - public SharePoint team site for my customers, vendors, partners.

Setting up DNS

If you're receiving email using your own domain name (anotherwords, not aol.com or earthlink.net) you're ready to go. If you do not have a domain name of your own you can register it at Network Solutions or Register.com. Domain name registration is a process of obtaining the right to use a domain name for your web site, email or anything else you please. If this is a new registration keep in mind that it can take 24-72 hours for your web site to become available to everyone on the Internet. When do you register the domain name you need to provide "name servers" which are servers that tell the rest of the people on the Internet where they can find your web site. Consult your domain name registrar and your ISP for assistance, your ISP should be able to offer their DNS servers as secondary or slave. For the remainder of this guide I'll assume that you've done all of the above and that your name servers are properly configured.

If your name servers are not on your local network and are hosted by your ISP or another DNS provider you can safely skip forward to Setting up IIS. Remember to request that your ISP (or company hosting the DNS for you) point www.vladville.com, team.vladville.com or extranet.vladville.com to your public, static IP address.

First, lets create DNS zones for the new vladville.com domain. Find your DNS. Start, Run, dnsmgmt.msc or Start > All Programs > Administrative Tools > DNS (or simply hit Start Key + R, type in dnsmgmt.msc and hit Enter).

Expand your Forward Lookup Zones and select New Zone.

This will start a New Zone Wizard. Click Next to continue.

You are creating a Primary Zone. Click Next to continue.

For the Active Directory Replication Scope you can accept the default and click Next to continue (default is "To all domain controllers in the Active Directory domain...")

Zone Name is your domain name. I will use vladville.com in this example, you should enter the domain name you registered.

Set the Dynamic Update to "Do not allow dynamic updates" and click Next to continue.

Completing the New Zone Wizard is the final screen giving you the summary of the zone you just created. Click Finish to continue.

Expand the new domain and look in the details pane (thats the one on the right). Right click and select New Host (A) record. First, lets create the www record. Type in www in the Name field. Notice that when you type in your name the Fully qualified domain name automatically appends your domain name.

Next, type in your IP address. This IP address should be your public, static IP address provided by your ISP. If your SBS is also your router, select the public facing IP address of your network. My public static IP address is 72.29.99.222, yours will certainly be different. Click Add Host to continue.

Congratulations you've added the www record to your DNS. Click OK and repeat the process for team and for extranet. Use the same IP address. After you've added all three records your screen will look like below. Feel free to close the DNS management console and continue to configure your IIS server.

Setting up IIS

IIS (Internet Information Server) is Microsoft's web server that comes bundled with SBS2003. So much for the intro, lets dive right in.

Open up the Internet Information Server (IIS Manager) by going to Start > All Programs > Administrative Tools > Internet Information (IIS) Manager.

Expand your server, Web Sites, right click on Web Sites, select New, Web Sites. The Welcome to the Web Site Creation Wizard will show up. Click on Next to continue.

First, we'll provide the web site description. I'm calling it the Vladville Web Site. Click on Next to continue.

IP address configuration:

• Enter the IP address to use for this Web Site: Select your public IP address from the drop-down menu that by default says (All Unassigned). I've selected my public address which is 72.29.99.222 (yours will be different).
• TCP port tis Web site should use (Default: 80): Leave this as the default port 80.
• Host header for this Web site (Default: None): Provide the FQDN name here, for this site I'm using www.vladville.com (yours will be different).

Click on Next to continue.

Enter the path to your home directory. Click on Browse, expand your local drive and click on Make New Folder. Call it Web. Click on Web and then click Make New Folder again. Call this new folder, www.vladville.com -- click on the www.vladville.com and then click on OK to continue.

The wizard will return to the Web site Home Directory with the path filled in. If its not filled in, type it in manually. Leave the Allow anonymous access to this Web site screen checked and continue.

Web Site Access Permissions default of Read is sufficient unless you intend to run ASP scripts. Click Next to continue.

Your're done. Click on Finish. Now, repeat this process for all the other web sites you're creating. Keep in mind that each will have a unique Fully Qualified Domain Name (www.vladville.com, team.vladville.com, extranet.vladville.com) and that they all need a different home directory.

Once you've created all three sites your screen should look something like this. Congratulations, you've created 3 empty web sites. Now lets populate them with FrontPage and SharePoint.

Configuring FrontPage

Right click on the Vladville Web Site, All Tasks, Configure Server Extensions.

Click on Submit to extend the virtual server with FrontPage Server Extensions 2002.

This brings us to the Frontpage Server Administration screen. To assign a username and a password to your new web site click on the Vladville Web Site. You will be prompted for the Administrator username and password.

Let's add a user that will become the administrator (or webmaster) of this web site. Click on Manage users to continue.

Add a user. You have a choice of adding a user that already exists in your Active Directory or you can create a brand new user responsible for this web site. I will use my personal (vlad) account. Select Administrator as the role. This page shows the users that have access to manage your web site. You should not be opening web pages using your Administrator account and you should definitely never give Administrator access to your webmaster. With that in mind, click on Add User.

You are now presented with the users available on this web site. Congratulations, you've created a FrontPage-enabled web. You can now open up FrontPage and manage this web site.

Configuring SharePoint Team Site

Right click on the Vladville Team, All Tasks, SharePoint Central Administration.

Just like with FrontPage, we are going to extend this web. Click on Extend or upgrade virtual server to continue.

Select the Virtual Server to extend. Let's click on team.vladville.com and move on.

SharePoint stores its data in a content database so click on Extend a create a content database.

We're going to create a new Application Pool for our SharePoint team site. I am calling this one teamvladvillecom. For the security account I am using the default Administrator account.

Site Owner is the person that will actually manage this SharePoint team site. I am using my personal vlad account for that. I will accept all the other defaults, scroll down and click OK to continue.

That's all. Give it a minute to actually extend the web and create the database and you should be done.

Click on the address of the top-level Web site URL and you're ready to start configuring your Team intranet. Give it a moment, SharePoint is an ASP application so it does take a moment to compile. In a few seconds you will be ready to pick your template:

And thats all, you've got your very own private SharePoint site! Start inviting your users to it and customize the layout/content of the page.

Configuring Public (Anonymous) SharePoint

Each SharePoint account requires a CAL which is a finite (and expensive) resource in SBS if you try to work with public: customers, vendors, accountants, volunteers, etc. SharePoint is a very powerful framework that can let you communicate with all those people without requiring them to login into your extranet. Imagine pointing your customers to a web page where they can download documents, fill out surveys, upload content and work with you effectively without having to deal with HTML, hire a coder or a webmaster? Thats the power of anonymous SharePoint.

First step is actually configuring the SharePoint team site using the same steps outlined in the previous section. Go ahead and create the SharePoint site called extranet.vladville.com (obviously your name will be different from mine. Login to the site as the site owner you specified, in my case vlad, and go to the site settings.

After you have logged on as the site owner (in this case vlad). Click on Site Settings.

Click on Go to Site Administration.

Click on Manage anonymous access.

Configuring anonymous access is a matter of preference, what should unauthenticated users be allowed to access? I will only be sharing documents and pictures so I will select Lists and libraries. Click on OK to continue.

You're done with Site anonymous access. Time to configure anonymous access on the IIS virtual server. Get back to the Internet Information Server (IIS) Manager and right click on extranet.vladville.com. Select Properties. click on the Directory Security tab then click on Edit.

Check the Enable anonymous access and uncheck Integrated Windows authentication. Click on OK. Click on Apply. You're done, point your users to the anonymous SharePoint site extranet.vladville.com

Additional Consideration

Bandwidth. Perhaps next to money, one very limited quantity in SBS networks is Internet bandwidth. If you expect to have very high traffic on your web sites (or perhaps offer very large files) your Internet connection may not be sufficient to support multiple users or even a single user downloading a huge file. Keep that in mind as your web site becomes more popular.

SSL Security. Most small business Internet connections come with a single static IP address. With just one IP address you can only have one secure web site. If that is the case, you should seriously consider getting additional IP addresses if you're passing sensitive information over the Internet. By default, SBS 2003 Configure E-mail and Internet Connection wizard creates a self-signed SSL certificate for your Default Web Site which will eat that single static IP address. If your SharePoint site is in addition to the companyweb and needs to be Internet accessible you will need extra IP's.

Default Web Site. This web site holds your Outlook Web Access, Outlook Mobile Access, Remote Web Workplace, Terminal Services and all other components of your SBS system. It is not a good place to put your public web pages and it is definitely not a good place to experiment.

SBS is not designed to function as a web server. This is just one of very common myths spread by people that do not understand SBS. IIS under SBS is every bit as flexible as it is in the Windows Server 2003 Standard or Enterprise. You can host multiple web sites on it as the guide above explains. You just can't host web sites for others.

So now I'm a web hosting provider? Not quite. You can not use your SBS server (or any other server for that matter) to provide web hosting for your partners, employees or other commercial efforts. To become a hosting provider you must register with Microsoft and sign a sPLA (Service Provider Licensing Agreement).