Hosts Tools

Bandwidth Meter for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 is a unique tool for MS Virtual Server 2005 bandwidth usage monitoring, counting and reporting.

What makes it unique? It provides a bandwidth control on per virtual server basis for different protocols (ARP, TCP, UDP, ICMP, IGMP). With this tool you can see the amount of data used (downloaded and uploaded) by each virtual server. Thus you can bill your customers for the bandwidth usage or just find out which servers cause a high network load.

Installation is straightforward and only takes a minute by entering IP address of your server and clicking several buttons.

For more information, please read this document.

SQL Bandwidth Meter is a unique tool for SQL Server bandwidth usage monitoring, counting and reporting.

What makes it unique? It provides a bandwidth control on per user basis. With this tool you can see the amount of data used (downloaded and uploaded) by each SQL Server user. Thus you can bill your customers for the SQL bandwidth usage or just find out which customers use your SQL server intensively.

The current version of SQL Bandwidth Meter works with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 only and is able to count unencrypted TCP/IP traffic. (Please contact us if you need a version for SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2005.)

Installation is straightforward and only takes a minute by entering IP address and port of your SQL server and clicking several buttons.

For more information, please read this document.

As you know, our company is an ISV (independent software vendor), but it is also an established web hosting provider. We provide Windows web hosting services for almost 7 years already (at www.DotNetpark.com) and our hosting business keeps growing.

At DotNetPark we offer shared hosting and virtual dedicated servers. And most of our virtual servers are powered by Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. Yes, we know, Hyper-V is here and we do use it. But MS Virtual Server 2005 is still actual and lots of companies use it.

If you provide VDS (VPS) hosting based on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 you know that it does not have a built-in bandwidth usage meter. You need to bill your customers monthly for bandwidth usage (or over usage), but MS Virtual Server 2005 does not make such a report.

Moreover, if you make your own piece of software and try to use MS Virtual Server API you realize fast that there is a bug in MS Virtual Server built-in bandwidth meter function making it just useless.

Fortunately, our programmers found a way to monitor and meter virtual server traffic usage and made an application for it. We use this program in our web hosting business and recently decided to make it a commercial product.

As you know, it is quite easy to make a program for yourself, but it takes a lot of time to make the same piece of software good enough (nice, documented, configurable) for public needs. Anyway, we polish the tool now and are going to show it to you soon!

DNS Inspector 1.0 is finally here!

DNS Inspector is a tool to check DNS health of your (and, of course, your clients’) domain names. It allows to check MX, SOA, NS, reverse DNS (PTR) and other records, compare results of primary and secondary DNS servers and much more. It can inspect multiple domain names at a time and gives you a detailed and easy to read DNS reports.

No installation required! No configuration required.
Just run it and enjoy.

1. Enter a domain name or several domains in “Domains:” field. One domain name per line.
2. Click “Test DNS” button.
3. Wait a little, the program will check DNS health of the domains and create appropriate reports.
4. When the test finished, click report names in “Reports:” list and view them.

IIS Sites Transfer 2.0.3 released.

New features:

- added: Processing and creation of ‘IIsWebFile’ object
- added: Processing of ‘Custom’ tag of all elements of the IIS metabase

IIS Sites Transfer 2.0.2 released.

New features:

- added: Multiple IIS FTP sites processing
- improved: IIS metabase parsing speed

(You can see more in history.txt file distributed with the program.)

Micro SQL Admin is a tiny tool written in PHP intended for MS SQL Server 2008 and 2005 administration over the World Wide Web.

It is FREE!

How to install the Micro SQL Admin:

1. Install SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP.

2. Place index.php to any folder of your website. Be sure there are correct permissions to run PHP. You can rename index.php if you wish.

SimpleDNS Client is a program that can remotely administer Simple DNS Plus servers. It is a Windows GUI application and its interface is similar to Simple DNS server. It allows to create, modify, delete DNS zones etc.

Current version 1.0.6 allows to work with primary DNS zones only. Secondary DNS zones support is coming soon.

This program is especially useful when you use GPRS to manage your Simple DNS server. It works 23 to 51 times faster than Remote Desktop!

No installation required! Just run it and enjoy.

Read more…

IIS Sites Transfer 2.0.1 is finally here! You can see its new easy-to-use Wizard interface and enjoy its new features. The sites transfer process is as easy as 1-2-3 now!

New features:

v.2.0.1

- added: Multithreaded processing

v.2.0

- added: Transfer of AccessRead|AccessWrite properties of FTP accounts
- added: Transfer of 29 new IIS website parameters (see the manual for more info)
- added: Transfer of all website directories (virtual and web)
- added: It is possible to change web site home directory
- added: Detailed transfer log
(You can see more in history.txt file distributed with the program.)

The IIS Sites Transfer program is designed to transfer web sites from Microsoft Internet Information Server version 6 (IIS 6) to another IIS 6 server. The program also allows to transfer Windows 2003 users from one server to another and copy FTP logins, virtual directories, application pools, Web/FTP folders structure and assign NTFS folders permissions.

It is a unique tool. There are no such tools as this one, which allows easy transfer lots of web sites at a time, including all usernames, permissions, pools and so on.

IIS Sites Transfer utility does not require a clean installation of Internet Information Services! Moreover, the tool can even help you to transfer any selected group of websites, so you can distribute your websites easily to adjust the servers load.

The most outstanding feature of this tool is that it is able to transfer websites even if the IISAdmin service is not running on the source server! You even do not need the source server to be up and running, you just need to have the metabase.xml file from the server. This makes the IIS Sites Transfer program not only a migration and balancing utility, it is also a disaster recovery tool.

Please take a look at IIS Sites Transfer Quick Start Guide to see how easy it is to migrate websites with this program.

No installation required! No configuration required.
Just run it and enjoy.

Note:

• You need to have metabase.xml file from the source server to accomplish the sites transfer.
  MetaBase.xml is an XML file containing IIS configuration settings. Its default location is
  C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\
• The tool does not help to copy files between servers. But there are a lot of tools and different methods to do so. For example, you can zip (using WinZIP or WinRAR) the files and FTP the archive.
• The IIS Sites Transfer tool does not help to export/import SSL certificates. Please read this article if you need to transfer SSL certificates.
• The tool is not able to copy Administrators user group between servers.

IIS Pools - IIS Application Pools Monitoring

• This program allows monitoring of IIS 6 application pools.
• All the monitoring data is stored in log files.
• It is possible to analyze a pool to find a website (or a virtual application) using too much resources.

Note: Current version of the program allows monitoring and logging of both CPU and RAM usage. But there is an auto-analysis of CPU usage only.

For more information, please read this document.

No installation required! Just run it and enjoy.

IIS Passwords Sync is a command line tool. And it is free!

IIS 6.0 web sites run under anonymous user accounts. It is IUSR_<machine name> (by default) or other user accounts created by your web hosting control panel. The users’ passwords are set automatically and are never known. However, sometimes for some reason the passwords get out of sync or corrupted and need to be reset. The easiest way to reset these passwords is to use IIS Passwords Sync program. It extracts the passwords that Microsoft IIS 6.0 has in its metabase and updates the accounts in Local Users and Groups to use that passwords.

Run synciis.exe to see IIS Passwords Sync command line syntax.

Note:

• After the passwords synchronization you have to restart Internet Information Services (IIS 6.0) by using its MMC Manager snap-in or iisreset.exe program.
• If there are 2 or more websites running under the same user account the password will be taken from one of them only, even if they have different passwords.

No installation required! No configuration required.
Just run it and enjoy.

We believe you hate SPAM (especially if it was sent by your customer from your server and you are blacklisted now), don’t you?

The IIS SMTP Monitor program (Windows service) is a tool for IIS 7 (and IIS 6) Pickup folder monitoring. The tool saves the following information in its log file: File Name, File Owner (Windows Account Name), First N bytes of the file (e-mail message). Believe it or not, it is free!

Windows web hosting providers do need this tool to stop outgoing SPAM. If you allow to send mail with ASP or PHP scripts with CDONTS or CDOSYS, your web hosting clients are able to send SPAM from your servers anonymously. And then it gets very difficult to track it down and stop SPAM. As a result, your server is blacklisted and all your customers have problems now. To avoid this you should install IIS SMTP Monitor.

You should also use unique Windows User Names for your IIS websites. Do not use IUSR_computername for all websites. Instead create and assign a new account for each site. E.g. IUSR_SiteNameHere. Actually all decent web hosting control panels do this automatically.

If you have IIS SMTP Monitor installed, you can see the origin (the owner username) of outgoing SPAM messages sent by your customers. And you can find the website by its unique user name and STOP SPAM.

For more information, please read this document.

No installation required! Just run it and enjoy.

IIS Report is a command line tool. It allows to create different IIS related reports. For example it can get the list of all SSL websites and sort it by IP address, or get the list of all websites and sort it by application pool name and then by website name, etc.

No installation required. Just start the program this way:

to get more information and see all the parameters available.

No installation required! No configuration required. Just run it and enjoy.

The Black Lists Checker is a tool created to help monitor multiple IP addresses with multiple anti-spam blacklists (also known as DNSBL and DNS blacklists).

This tool is useful to mail server administrators and web hosting providers. It helps to troubleshoot e-mail delivery problems.

You can create your own lists of DNSBL and IP addresses. Both may have unlimited size.

There are 2 configuration files with the program parameters:

• DNSBL.txt - place your list of DNSBL servers here.
• IP.txt - place your mail servers IP addresses here. (By the way: 127.0.0.2 is a test IP address, it is blacklisted in all black lists)

There are some popular DNSBL services already, but you can add your favourite ones.

No installation required! Just run it and enjoy.

Softpedia.com guarantees that our software products are 100% clean, which means they do not contain any form of malware, including but not limited to: spyware, viruses, trojans and backdoors.

Rackspace, a leading provider of hosted IT services, has been ranked 32 on FORTUNE’s 11th annual “100 Best Companies to Work For” list. This company uses our software.

We need your feedback. Please post your comments here or email us at sales[at]hoststools.com

Share you thoughts and ideas.

What should we improve or add? What do you like or dislike? How did our programs help you?

Thanks a lot for your valuable feedback!

For some weird reason secondary Simple DNS server waits too long sometimes to update DNS records changed on primary DNS server. Especially if lots of records were changed in a short time.

It takes too much time to reload all the records manually in such cases. So we recommend to run the following script on your secondary Simple DNS server. The script forces the server to make the secondary zones update.

The script is created, tested and used many times by our team and our friends. And we feel the need to share it with our website community. Use it and enjoy!

Read more…