Likelihood to Recommend Microsoft Application Server has been incredible this past year during COVID. Previously I would have said that we could go without it, but after this past season, I’m glad we have utilized it. Without having this software set up prior to COVID, we would have been in a tough situation. I mention COVID a lot because we were able to continue our work almost seamlessly this entire year.
Read full review [NGINX] is very well suited for high performance. I have seen it used on servers with 1k current connections with no issues. Despite seeing it used in many environments I've never seen software developers use it over apache, express, IIS in local dev environments so it may be more difficult to setup. I've also seen it used to load balance again without issues.
Read full review Pros Microsoft Application Server has proven to be highly reliable and effective at deploying to all of its clients. Application performance is surprisingly good and responsive even in bandwidth-constrained environments and generally very reliable. All software programs are manageable from a single location, even when bandwidth is limited. Read full review Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture). Great at serving static content. Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability. Open-Source (no cost)! Read full review Cons Some security hotfixes and general release updates require restarts. We wish it supported more applications out of the box. Thin client support would be great for MS Application Server. Read full review Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue? I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this. It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work. It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together. I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Great value for the product
Read full review Usability I have found Microsoft Application Server to be incredibly easy to use. I have used dozens of similar programs and have always struggled to navigate through all the functions. So far I have been able to adapt and learn this software with ease. I rarely run into a problem that I wasn’t easily able to move forward on with a few tips.
Read full review Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application . Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective . Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.
Read full review Support Rating Stability is one of the first things we consider when evaluating software. MS Application Server has been rock solid and has reduced the time that our IT staff dedicates to maintaining our legacy applications.
Read full review John Reeve Principal, Lead developer, Lead designer
Read full review Alternatives Considered It has a similar feature to what Microsoft Application Server has but at a greater cost and also having to deal with another vendor when we could use a full Microsoft Stack for better training and support.
Read full review We have used Traffic, Apache, Google Cloud Load Balancing and other managed cloud-based load balancers. When it comes to scale and customization nothing beats Nginx. We selected Nginx over the others because
we have a large number of services and we can manage a single Nginx instance for all of them we have high impact services and Nginx never breaks a sweat under load individual services have special considerations and Nginx lets us configure each one uniquely Read full review Return on Investment Our ROI has been great since it has enabled our IT staff to have a central location to perform application updates which enables us to save time and money. Deployment is very easy since the internal applications that required constant updating are now updated in one central location. It's a lot easier to be within compliance protocols requirements. Read full review Nginx has decreased the burden of web server administration and maintenance, and we are spending less time on server issues than when we were using Apache. Nginx has allowed more people in our company to get involved with configuring things on the web server, so there's no longer a single point of failure ("the Apache guy"). Nginx has given us the ability to handle a larger number of requests without scaling up in hardware quite so quickly. Read full review ScreenShots