Should I put my ASP.NET websites in the wwwroot folder?

Question

I have a number of websites that run under IIS on a single machine.

Should I put these websites inside of the C:\inetpub\wwwroot\ folder or inside the C:\inetpub\ folder?

E.g.

• C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Website1\
• C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Website2\

or

• C:\inetpub\Website1\
• C:\inetpub\Website2\

Are there any pros/cons for either or another recommended location (I only have a C drive on this machine)?

I am not sure whether there is a "correct" answer to this, but want to follow best practice if there is one.

Many thanks, Jonathan

Answer 1

Go the second route.

wwwroot is simply there as the container for the default website for the server. If you delete the default website from within IIS, then you can safely remove this directory. Regardless, your sites have nothing to do with the default, so they should be in their own folders under inetpub.

That said, we sometimes have multiple "types" of sites on the same server. For example DEV and QA. In this case I would structure it as:

c:\inetpub\dev\site1
c:\inetpub\dev\site2

c:\inetpub\qa\site1
c:\inetpub\qa\site2

Answer 2

As variant:

C:\WebSites\my.site1.com

C:\WebSites\my.site2.com

Answer 3

if you prefer you can put your application folder on desktop of your server. It is really up to you. You just need to make the proper configurations inside IIS and grant necessary access permissions to your folder. That's all.

Answer 4

There is no definitive answer but

• C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Website1\
• C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Website2\

are the standard locations for web sites. For example c:\inetpub\ftproot could be used to host an FTP site.