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IIS The Flop Microsoft Server Article
IIS-The Flop Microsoft Server
from: Jon St. George - Designs-By-Jon.comThough Microsoft has dominated the computer markets with al its products however, their web server software sits on a relatively low 20% market share, thanks to the popularity of Apache. Still you must know about IIS.
Security issues with IIS- IIS is mainly known for its terrible security record, most famously when a security hole allowed the Code Red worm (a kind of virus) to spread between IIS servers back in 2001 . Microsoft was forced to issue press releases asking people to secure their servers, which meant that millions of webmasters had to go to Microsoft’s website and download a patch to fix the problem. Most of IIS' security holes were caused by services that most people don't use.
For the latest version, Microsoft turned off unnecessary services and made the server run with fewer privileges, creating a much more secure web server. But there are plenty of servers based on IIS 2001.
Stability issues with IIS- Another major criticism of IIS is that it has a tendency to fail under heavy loads, as it cannot handle large number of many connections at one time.
Some good things about IIS- The key reason why anyone uses IIS is that the people created their websites using Microsoft's software. This means that the database used is Microsoft SQL, and their pages are written using ASP (Active Server Pages), the latest version being ASP.Net. ASP is easy to use, as most scripts are written in a Visual Basic-like language named VBScript, and comes with an efficient environment that makes it easy to create dynamic websites.
Till 2001, ASP was the leading solution for dynamic web pages (it was beaten by PHP the next year though). Open source languages can seem unreliable to managers but they were unwilling to make the change from technology that had the backing of a big company like Microsoft.
IIS Alternatives- There are so many people out their waiting to switch away from IIS that a market has been created to help them to move away from IIS while letting them keep their ASP code. The best solution is made by Sun, and you can see it at www.sun.com/software/chilisoft. However, this is not a free software and is priced at a higher side.
The best thing for a newbie would be to stay away from IIS from the start and use VBScript and any other web server.