Nice article and I agree with you most points. While some issues are with the hosting provider others are to do with IIS.

I had the same problems with Wordpress installed with Plesk. Some of the not so obvious changes are to ensure PHP runs as an ISAPI application, enabling SSI. Your use of permalinks solved one of the issues.

Matters are made even worse when you develop on a local machine and then upload to a production server.

Regards,

Gaurav

I am using xampp for windows:
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html

Everything should work fine as the important applicatons that need to interact for the WordPress to run fine is the AMP (Apache MySQL PHP). And because they both work on Linux and Windows, they show no problems.

Though, some plugins use Unix commands, but that’s their mistake, they should make their code application oriented and make no use of OS commands.

The only thing I am having trouble with is improving the site security with tying up file/folder access permissions. I couldn’t know how to transform CHMOD permissions to Windows. There are three accounts that should have their permissions set: Owner, Local and Internet. I know how to transform the CHMOD value to the 3 accounts but I couldn’t know which user accounts in Windows do these represent. Do you know them?

Just wanted to say thanks for this post; I was searching for answers as to why I was having so many problems with installing Wordpress for my boss’ website; hosting technical support wasn’t much help either…it turns out he chose Windows hosting.

I’m not as technical as you but I experienced the problems you listed; upload feature not working, permission problems, pages not working…I learned the hard way and am trying to switch over to Linux.

Thanks for the insight!

The CLUES:

The Brit lives in the Red house.
The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
The Dane Drinks tea.
The Green House is on the left of the White House.
The Green House’s owner drinks coffee.
The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
The man in the center house drinks milk.
The Norwegian lives in the first house.
The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats
The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
The German smokes Prince.
The Norwegian lives next to the Blue House.
The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.
The QUESTION:

Who owns the fish?

An interesting thread. The comments about running stuff developed on a LAMP stack on W2K3 are generally true across the board. I deal a lot with Yabb and the issues are really basically the same. (I have 2 WordPress installs humming along nicely on a W2k3/IIS6 box - BUT its mine and I’m a former MCSE) LOL and a bunch of other stuff that was never designed to run that way…

I think the root problem is two-fold.

ONE - people don’t qualify their hosting companies they just sign up with the cheapest package that says it will fit. Can you say BAD IDEA? I have always believed in going to the User Forums of software packages as the very first step in making decisions. Nobody on MY box type - maybe bad idea, complaints about Hosts - good place to weed them out. I send an e-mail and ask for a reference account. If they ask you to explain the app, time to move on. Just me…

TWO - Hosting companies that run *nix but ‘offer Windows’ too, tend to be staffed by penguin heads - Hey I love Tuxedos! - who know little to nothing about IIS and NTFS. All you have to do is look at how Plesk is designed to know its a GRAFT of FTP/CPANEL/APACHE onto a Windows platform. (most hybrids are sterile for good reasons - they are unnatural!). Imagine having shared public_HTML folders on an IIS box and a tool that tells you its CHMOD - can you say designed for ease of support by people unfamiliar with IIS? If you must go with a Windows Host for a good reason - get a Windows only host and YOU will need to research the app first, AND e-mail them nicely and ask if they have any other wierdos like you, LOL. You never know!

I guess I can for sure say I agree with you on the ‘put it on the box it belongs on’ in the Hosted scenario unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise.

Thanks for an Interesting Thread.

–A few comments indicate that the problem may have been my ISP and not Wordpress running on top of Windows. Certainly, it was both. I think that we would all agree that Wordpress on Windows/IIS requires much more tweaking. Which is fine…if you’re a good tweaker, which my host iPower was not.

–Chip comments that iPower defaults to setting you up on the *nix platform. I believe this is true but several years before I was a Wordpress user, I was using all Microsoft stuff (Frontpage, .asp) and thus requested a Windows platform. I cannot comment on iPower with *nix but, if you do run into problems with iPower, expect to be on the phone for awhile! Also, in regards to # 4 & 5, they are legitimate gripes because of iPower (they did not even know the value to put in for dbhost!).

And, of course, iPower kept saying, “We don’t have any of these problems on the non-Windows” platform.

Bottom Line: Wordpress runs on Windows but requires significant tweaking. Why bother?

I only know that I am so much happier now that I’m off iPower, off Windows. My experience with Fuse has been great!

Thanks,
Richard

I will write about my experience with them at some point but I can tell you that thus far I have been extremely satisfied.

I have scarcely had any issues and the couple that I had in the beginning were responded to quickly and properly.

If you ISP is so bad, maybe you should host your own with DynDNS. its free.