How to deploy an ASP.NET Application with zero downtime

Question

To deploy a new version of our website we do the following:

1. Zip up the new code, and upload it to the server.
2. On the live server, delete all the live

Answer 1

You can achieve zero downtime deployment on a single server by utilizing Application Request Routing in IIS as a software load balancer between two local IIS sites on different ports. This is known as a blue green deployment strategy where only one of the two sites is available in the load balancer at any given time. Deploy to the site that is "down", warm it up, and bring it into the load balancer (usually by passing a Application Request Routing health check), then take the original site that was up, out of the "pool" (again by making its health check fail).

A full tutorial can be found here.