I'm currently developing a new ASP.NET project hosted on a Windows Server 2008 RC2 with an SQL Server 2008 Express database. I have three SQL Server instances (for different purposes) running which currently all contain a single database. For apparently no reason, these instances tend to shut down after some days. There might be low or no traffic to these instances, because there might be some days in a row, where I can't develop. It now occurred several times, that one or two of these three instances just shut down, so that I can't access the database, without manually starting the instance. I can't seem to find a event log entry for the shutdown, which is most likely because I just enabled logging (why is the default setting off?). So the questions are: * Why does an SQL Server instance shut down? (Is there such a thing as a "Shut down instance after 3 days of inactivity"? * How can I achieve that the instances are running 24/7? Edit: I solved this problem by writing my own application that checks for the status of the SQL Server services. My program will start via a batch file, that gets called by the Windows Task Scheduler every 5 minutes.