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Mosso's URL Rewriting Rules Are Wrong!

Posted by Andy Edinborough on June 1, 2009

Mosso has been in the game of hosting for quite a while now and have become quite popular.  I was amazed to learn when we began migrating one of our projects to them that their URL rewritting rules are incorrect.

In case you didn't know, Mosso provides a platform that supports both ASP.NET and PHP.  ASP.NET requests are sent to an IIS server, and PHP requests are sent to a Linux Apache server--cool idea.  Obviously you have to select a default technology to handle your own URL rewriting scheme, so that pages that don't exist are sent to the proper server. So, ...

     /this-does-not-exist/      --> Your Default Technology
     /this-does-not-exist.aspx  --> Windows IIS / ASP.NET
     /this-does-not-exist.php   --> Linux Apache / PHP

They handle query-strings properly so ...

     /this-does-not-exist.aspx?p=test.php   --> Windows IIS / ASP.NET
     /this-does-not-exist.php?p=test.aspx   --> Linux Apache / PHP

The rub comes in with the way they handle path parameters.  As the webserver is determining which handler should be assigned to a request, both IIS and Apache will look for scripts that match a requested filename, so /Default.aspx/Test/ is handled by Default.aspx.  Unfortunately, Mosso has not allowed for this.

In our case, we have a .NET site (http://namechk.com), with (at the time) a PHP (Wordpress) powered blog.  No problem anywhere else, /blog/index.php/2009/05/Some-New-Post/ is sent to /blog/index.php just fine.  But Mosse ignores index.php and the request is sent to IIS which has no idea what to do with it, and I get a lovely 404 screen.

I spoke with Mosso's usualy very friendly and helpful tech. support about the issue.  Their suggestion?  "Switch to PHP."  Seriously?  How about I stick to .NET and you fix your URL rewriting rules!