Best Approach for Updating a Live Website on Server

websites

I follow a very raw approach while updating my website on server. The approach I follow doesn't seem right, so I am interested in knowing a recommended way of updating a LIVE project, be it on shared host or dedicated server.

Right now, for any changes in View, I simply upload and overwrite the view files on server. Similarly for any code changes, I upload and overwrite the .dll and .pdb files. Currently my website doesn't have any traffic so there has been no issue so far. But, Is this a recommended approach for a website with good amount of traffic. And if not, then how should one approach updation on the server.

Best Answer

What many high traffic sites do is deploy using a web farm.

The general workflow is like this:

  • Take half of the servers off the farm
  • Update these servers and test
  • Put servers back in farm and take remaining servers off the farm
  • Update these servers and test
  • Put remaining servers back in farm

If this is no possible, I suggest creating two sites on your live server - a live site and a deployment site web applications and directories:

  • Deploy to the deployment site
  • Test
  • Change IIS configuration so:
    • The live site now points to the directory of the deployment site
    • The deployment site now points to the directory of the formerly live site
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