[MrEyes]

Apologies for what will be a rambling post, if you want scroll to the end for the actual point/question

I currently run a medium sized vBulletin forum - typical user loads is something like this:

• 600k posts
• 30k threads
• 2500 registered members
• Average 150 online
• Most online 350
• 1.5 million monthly page views.

And things are growing...

At the moment this is all running on a fully managed Linux CentOS VPS.

This is all well and good and the server easily manages the loads. However there is one critical problem here, and that problem is me. I am by no means a Linux expert so I find even the most trivial tasks quite complicated and the learning curve is extremely steep. Learning is good, however learning on a production/live server is, shall we say, fraught with dangers. Of course I could try and create an offline mirror of the server OS/Configuration etc and learn/test on that but to be honest, that is just a faff I could do without. Even though my current server is fully managed waiting for support to perform a change can sometimes be somewhat frustrating.

So taking my failings into consideration I am thinking about moving to a Windows based VPS instead. My real world job requires me to administer and develop for enterprise level windows based services (with loads and usages thousands of percent higher than the load on my forum), so I am of course extremely comfortable with Windows server management.

However, I have never run PHP/MySQL under IIS/Win32 Apache so I have no experience of how this setup holds up to load. I am fairly confident that this shouldn't be an issue, but there is no harm in getting community opinion on this.

So the question are:

1. Can a Windows Server 2003 Enterprise environment, running PHP in IIS stand up to and easily handle the task of running vBulletin.
2. Does anybody run a medium sized forum on Windows, if so what is your experience of it.
3. Would it be better to run Apache instead of IIS?