Advice for setting up a static file server with ASP.NET/ASP.NET MVC

Question

I would like to set up a subdomain (similar to stackoverflow's http://sstatic.net/) in order to serve static content for my existing web applications. I have never done this before and was wondering if anyone has advice - which technology to use (i am using the Microsoft stack), how i should structure the static site, what are the security and caching considerations etc.

ANY advice would be appreciated, Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I suggest you check out Amazon's S3 and Cloudfront services. Both are low cost and high performance. Their focus is serving up content.

I'm a happy S3 customer.

Added: You can easily set their services up so they appear as a subdomain of your site. Eg assets.yourdomain.com

Answer 2

Not to state the obvious, but if it's truly static, why do you need ASP.NET? This question has some advice on optimizing IIS as a static file server. If people do need to be authenticated to view static content, that will obviously complicate it slightly. sstatic.net does not use authentication.