Hi All,

I have an asp.net app that I want to deploy safely (with as little down time possible). I would love to do something like blue green deployment but without the need for a second web server.

So, I know I can use load balancing, etc but I need a quick and cheap approach. I was thinking of doing something like:

• Setting up another website (copy of original) in IIS, currently I use host headers to direct traffic across sites).
• I could then view the new site locally until the site is totally online (due to NHibernate start up and various other high intensity tasks this takes a while).
• Once site 2 is totally started I would then change host headers around giving me a much much smaller down time.

So my question is. Has anyone done anything like this? Will IIS restart my app pool or application when changing host headers (making this useless)? Any other options?

Thanks for your help all.

Guido