Overview of Shared Hosting Deployment Using ARR

Applies To: Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista

Application Request Routing (ARR) is a proxy-based routing module that forwards HTTP requests to content servers. ARR uses the URL Rewrite module to inspect incoming requests to make routing decisions that are based on HTTP headers, server variables, and load balance algorithms. In a shared hosting deployment, you can use the host name affinity feature in ARR to maximize your server resources and evenly distribute traffic across all your servers.

When there is an incoming request, ARR load balances and affinitizes the request to a Web server. The Web server retrieves content from a file share, and then sends a response back to the client that sent the original request. The host name affinity feature lets ARR affinitize requests, regardless of whether they were made from one client or multiple clients to one server that sits behind the ARR server in the server architecture. This guarantees that a given site can consume resources from only one server. A shared hosting deployment with ARR also lets you add new servers without predefined site allocations, gives you only one shared configuration to manage, evenly distributes your server resources, and dynamically load balances requests.

For more information, see Configure Shared Hosting Using ARR.

See Also

Concepts

ARR Common Tasks
ARR Tasks for Shared Hosters
Achieve High Availability and Scalability Using ARR and NLB for Shared Hosters