title: IIS Staging and Production swap
body: <p>I'm researching a way to integrate a staging environment on our IIS Server, where it is possible to warm up the application before swapping it with the production environment.</p>
  
  <p>The only real solution I can find is:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>Swapping directory settings</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Which to me sounds like a slow process, because the IIS will have to compile and warmup the new dir after the swap. ( Am I assuming this correctly?)</li>
  </ul></li>
  <li><p>Have two sites, and swap the bindings, after staging has been warmed up.</p></li>
  <li>Having a load balancer, and swapping between two sites. This just seems to be overkill, since both websites would be on the same server.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>The two first scenarios seem hacky, and error prone.</p>
  
  <p>Obviously there must be something I am missing. So I turn to you, the experts!</p>
  
  <p>Ps. We are on Windows Server 2012, IIS v8.0</p>