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Over the past five years I have built several Highly available microsoft web hosting farms , hosted web apps, and associated database servers and supporting services, each one slight better than the last.

Web farms
No 1. IIS5, NLB base load balancing, every web site usesing same process identity, many sites is shared pool
No 2. IIS6, Cisco CSM load balanced, 2 Node Physcial, unique ID for every site / application
No 3, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site / application
No 4, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site / application, second site
No 5, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site,  Internet facing with SSL
No 6, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site,  Intranet facing with SSL
No 7, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site,  Intranet facing with SSL
No 8, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site,  Intranet facing with SSL, for UAT use.

FTP, centralise FTP gateway providing a single FTP solution to every windows / Sambe wen server inside the enterprise

WordPress MU, enterprise blog solution

Now Finally I get to build an IIS7 one and FTP7 with FTP over SSL, watch this space

Due to the fact it is on my task list, I have been pondering the decision points for deploying a new web based application and supporting infrastructure. At a first stab there must be 400 questions which may be in the mix. The trick is to work out which ones are Critical to success, which ones have no impact, which ones can be linked and therefore become a single decision with many results. Does the implementation mean some of these decisions can be made after Go live (VMware lets you add extra resource to a guest operating system)
How much input can the business customer provide?
How much input can the application developer provider?
What assumptions can you make?

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Over the past 4 years I have had to work with some of the best web application developers I have ever met, unfortunately I have also had the miss-fortune of working with some of the worst developers on the planet.
With this in mind, while attending the Microsoft 2008 launch event,  I was very impressed to pick up a book entitled “the Developer Highway code : The drive for safer coding!” 
This book is fantastic, and has hundreds of coding guidelines and server configuration recommendations. And absolute MUST read for any ASP, ASP.NET developer and / or web server support staff.

The best bit, it is available as a free ebook, from Microsoft:
http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/msdn/devdave/mic472_dev_highway_all.pdf