Internet Information Services

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What Does Internet Information Services Mean?

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.

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Techopedia Explains Internet Information Services

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.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.