# Web Server 2008 - Need Advice



## ImagingGuy2015 (Feb 14, 2008)

Greetings,

I am debating whether or not the new "Web Server" flavour of server 2008 can meet my companies needs.

Right now we are using server 2003 ent and are hosting a website, have an FTP and have a domain and workgroup access. Out of our 20 or so employees about 7 actually use the domain, the rest just log into the local machine and are part of a workgroup.

Since we need to get rid of our old server 2003 (long story) I am wondering if I can get away with running web server 2008 to handle everything we need. This would include:

1. The company website (duh)
2. FTP
3. Workgroup capable of handling 15-20 machines accessing various shared folder throughout the day. (For example, the most we will ever have is 2-3 people browsing a single folder at once)

What I really need to know is:

1. What is the maximum amount of XP clients in a workgroup that can access the web server 2008?
2. Will there be any performance increase going to web server 2008 as far as local and external connections are concerned?

Running on a P4 2.8 with 3 or 4GB RAM with raid mirroring on two 250GB SATA drives. OnBoard gigabit connection.

Also, I know the workgroup limit is 10 XP machines, but how many XP machines can connect to the server 2008 at once? And if they are not all connecting at once (EX: people open a folder and open a file on the server ever 10-20 mins etc.) can I get away with this?

Big reason for all this is that web server 2008 license is dirt cheap. Since we have no need for a domain this seems like the best solution to me.

It almost seems too simple. Join 20 machines to a workgroup, join server to workgroup. Map shared folders on 20 machines to the server, then just setup the website and FTP...

Am I missing something?

Any thoughts or comments are greatly appreciated!!!

Thanks, Jeff


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## StumpedTechy (Jul 7, 2004)

I am pretty sure the 2008 has the same limitations of 10 concurrent connections. The 2003 web server had this in place and I don't see ANY documentation on the 2008 on this at all. I can see how they would want to gimp this to keep people from buying it to use it as a file server.

One way around it is you say you want to use it to FTP.... Why not set everyone to use FTP services?


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## ImagingGuy2015 (Feb 14, 2008)

is there any real benefit to using web server 2008 or should i just install IIS on the machine with either Vista or XP as an OS, or will there actually be a performance improvement going to server 2008 just to run a website/workgroup ?

A XP license I can get for $30 the web server 2008 costs $389+tax..


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## StumpedTechy (Jul 7, 2004)

XP IIS has a 10 user connection limit. As the server IIS does not. There is a "hack" to get the number any number below 40 but IMHO if your think about having a number of users hitting this as a web/ftp server your going to want to stay server OS based.


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