NOTICE: We no longer offer any Microsoft related products/technologies for sale including Shared Hosting and VPS Server.
What are the main differences between Windows Server 2003 and 2008?
- IP Address: Because Windows Server 2008 will be on a separate server, migrating from Windows Server 2003 to 2008 will mean that your website's IP address will change.
- Scripting Paths: Your website is made up of interconnected script and image files. They all reside on our servers and your scripts (like index.html) tell your browser which to load and where to find them. Migration from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008 will physically move your files from one server to another and thus require you to change the paths your scripts use to look for your site files.
- ODBC Drivers: ODBC Drivers allow a web application to make connections to a database. Because these drivers are of a later version in Windows Server 2008 a small change will need to be made when migrating your data.
- CDONTS: CDONTS is a method used to allow a website to send email from a webpage. CDONTS has been replaced with CDOSYS in Windows Server 2008.
- FrontPage: FrontPage Extensions allowed Microsoft FrontPage to communicate with web servers. As this is no longer supported by Microsoft, Frontpage Server Extensions will no longer be available for use on a Windows 2008 server, although Frontpage can still be used in FTP mode to edit and upload web pages.
- Basic/Advanced Password Protection: Basic/Advanced Password Protection is a feature that was provided by us on old Windows Server 2003 hosting packages. This allowed customers to password protect directories in their website. Once you have migrated to Windows Server 2008, this feature will no longer work.
- iHTML: iHTML is only supported by IIS6 and earlier. As Windows 2008 uses IIS7, iHTML is no longer supported.
- .EXE File Handling: .exe files are executable files. These might simply be files for your users to download or they could be CGI applications which you execute. Our Windows 2008 Server platform handles these files slightly differently to our Windows Server 2003 platform.