Tech moves fast! Stay ahead of the curve with Techopedia!
Join nearly 200,000 subscribers who receive actionable tech insights from Techopedia.
Internet Information Services (IIS), formerly known as Internet Information Server, is a web server producted by Microsoft. IIS is used with Microsoft Windows OSs and is the Microsoft-centric competition to Apache, the most popular webserver used with Unix/Linux-based systems.
IIS was initially released for Windows NT and, along with ASP (Active-Server Pages), finally made a Windows-box a usable alternative for web-hosting. That being said, it was also noted for being completely wide-open out of the box and required significant configuration to be made secure.
This changed with later releases, and IIS is now generally considered by many to be a stable and usable product. As of 2011, the most current version is IIS 7, which includes pretty much all modern features you'd expect to see in a webserver, including tight integration to ASP.NET. Though, as with any Microsoft vs Linux debate, some would argue that Apache is the only way to go.
Join nearly 200,000 subscribers who receive actionable tech insights from Techopedia.