IIS

IIS (Internet Information Services), formerly known as Internet Information Server, is a web server produced by Microsoft. IIS is used with Microsoft Windows OSs and is the Microsoft-centric competition to Apache, the most popular web server used with Unix/Linux-based systems.

Microsoft’s Internet Information Services provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for managing websites and the associated users. It provides a visual means of creating, configuring, and publishing sites on the web. The IIS Manager tool allows web administrators to modify website options, such as default pages, error pages, logging settings, security settings, and performance optimizations.

IIS supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SMTP and NNTP.

Internet Information Server (IIS) includes a set of programs for building and administering Web applications, search engines, and support for writing Web-based applications that access databases such as SQL Server. With IIS, you can make your computer work as a Web server and provides the functionality to develop and deploy ASP.NET Web applications on the server. You can also set security for a particular website for specific Users and Computer in order to protect it from unauthorized access.

IIS can serve both standard HTML webpages and dynamic webpages, such as ASP.NET applications and PHP pages. When a visitor accesses a page on a static website, IIS simply sends the HTML and associated images to the user’s browser. When a page on a dynamic website is accessed, IIS runs any applications and processes any scripts contained in the page, then sends the resulting data to the user’s browser.

Internet Information Server (IIS) is one of the most popular web servers from Microsoft that is used to host and provide Internet-based services to ASP.NET and ASP Web applications.

IIS is a popular option for commercial websites, since it offers many advanced features and is supported by Microsoft. However, it also requires a commercial license and the pricing increases depending on the number of users.