I just shifted a number of sites to this hosting company. As you'll likely be aware it's pushing a sort of virtual host concept which claims to be more flexible than older approaches. It seems to be flexible; it remains to be seen how reliable it all is.

There are a few things which are different here compared with standard IIS7, probably because of their internal architecture.

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This site used to live on IX web hosting. I'm not sure what happened at IX, but 2009 hasn't been a good year for them. I ran six web sites there and they seemed to be  more down than up, or at least that's how it felt. My monitoring service suggested that towards the end they were as bad as 80% available on a week-by-week basis. That's bad enough, but even worse were their "customer services"

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I've struggled with how to display panoramas on the web, previously using just the browser to display them. The standard flash plugin I'm using doesn't render them well: it works best with images of consistent size. "Lightbox" gets around that issue. The original Lighbox is Prototype/ Scriptaculous based. I like those, but MS are moving towards JQuery, and as this is running on ASP.NET, I used the JQuery Lighbox extension.

I lashed up a little extension to BlogEngine.NET which squirts out the magic incantations required for JQuery and the Lightbox extension to it, and then I hacked someone's thumbnailing extension for BlogEngine.NET ... so now I can drop images in here and they're automagically thumbnailed and displayed in a lightbox.

Like this:

These are all huge panoramas, so you'll need a fairly large screen to see them. I do have a bunch of nodal-point gear, but these were all taken hand-held and then stitched using PTGui and/or Photoshop. And as they're displayed without browser plugins, they're pretty much the only photographs on this site which you can see in the correct colours.

I found the BlogEngine.NET extension handler rather flakey. The principle's great, but it needs a little polishing. Unless you happen to have a wet afternoon to spare.

or what to do if your web hosting company use weird anti-spam mechanisms and you can't convince their support people that there are better ways to do this.

1 the problem

It's standard to avoid open SMTP relays in order to make life harder for anonymous idiots sending spam through an ISP's servers. So everyone closes those SMTP ports, usually 25. That's a bit serious if you're a valid customer though, and you actually want to send your non-spam email. There are several approaches to letting you do that, including:

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