I am moving our company's website to a colo web server running Web Server 2008 R2. We will be looking to host multiple sites from this server that are for public/customer viewing as well as other applications for internal office use.
As I'm working through my thought process of hosting these multiple websites should I be looking at simply creating subdomains within my main website and let IIS 7 point to the appropriate location or should I use DNS to point to a different port on the IP address?
In addition, what steps would I need to go through to host the sites on a drive different from the system drive? I've included a 2TB RAID to build all web applications on but in my current experience I've only hosted those from the default wwwroot folder on the system drive.
Best Answer
I would recommend using the domain names you want for business needs, use one IP for the server, and letting IIS sort out the mess with bindings.
Choose either mutliple domains (domain1.com, domain2.com) or sub domains (sub1.domain.com, sub2.domain.com) for each 'site'
Create an IIS site for each domain or sub-domain ('site')
Attach proper site bindings to the IIS sites
Use the same IP for all sites in your primary nameserver record (or a VIP if you are using some load balancer)
As for the drives, IIS doesn't really care, just use directories and Virtual Directories to get things where they need to be for the site