Microsoft IIS vs. NGINX

IIS as a web application server is perfectly suited for .net, .net core, asp.net applications. Our core ESB runs on IIS and has hundreds of gigabytes of data moved through it every day spread across millions of transactions. We have other mission critical applications that deliver our results to patients and doctors relying on IIS web application servers. If you stay in the Microsoft development stack, IIS is a top tier, efficient, and reliable web server.

Incentivized

[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.

Incentivized

• A big advantage that we use all the time is reviewing the logs that automatically get generated in IIS. It has helped us troubleshoot various problems in our applications over the years.
• IIS integrates really well with Visual Studio and TFS. We are able to quickly deploy new applications and changes to applications when requested by the business.
• IIS has proven that it is easy to configure and maintain with minimal effort.

Incentivized

• Straight-forward configuration format that users of all skill levels can learn, and yet is powerful enough for the huge breadth of features that Nginx provides.
• Massive scale right out the box. We've never had a Nginx instance overwhelmed by requests, and if we did it would be trivial to spin up more Nginx instances to handle the load.
• SSL termination means that we can deliver content over HTTPS without needing our individual services to require TLS support. This saves us a lot of time and headache while keeping us secure.
• Nginx is open-source and free, meaning that anyone can use it to power their services, from individual projects to billion-dollar websites.

Incentivized

• For some web applications, it takes additional time to configure IIS to make a website work.
• IIS logging - it is not the strongest side of the product.
• Compared to Apache or Nginx, IIS uses way more system resources.
• Even with regular patches, IIS has many vulnerabilities.

Incentivized

• 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.

We have no intention to replace all applications running on top of the IIS platform. Not all applications support other platforms and not all support staff are skilled in Linux/Apache platform support. Whereas IIS may not be the best performing or most secure web platform available, for the aforementioned reasons, it is impossible not to continue use of this product.

Incentivized

Great value for the product

Incentivized

In general, Microsoft IIS is an alright product. It comes natively with Windows Server. It has good enough GUI to set things up & tweak things around. Once properly setup, it runs stably enough. And with enough Powershell magic, having a CI/CD pipeline to automatically deploy a new version of the application is doable.

Incentivized

This tool is really easy to use and configure. Consumes very less system resources. It is highly modular and configurable. You can easily use it with other tools like certbot for SSLs. You can configure basic security with configuration and headers

Incentivized

ARR (application request routing) in Microsoft IIS Server enables the web-admins to increase the web app reliability and availability through the rule based routing and load balancing of HTTP requests which in turn provides highly available server. IIS 7.0 Manager also provides kernel as well as user mode caching for faster performance and in case if the server fails, the IIS server has good amount of details logged in its log files which help understand and debug the cause quickly. Load balancing facilitates IIS server to fight against availability issues.

Incentivized

In my experience, I have never had significant issues with IIS performance. Sometimes I've experienced issues with loading time, but it is mostly related to the web site code. However Amazon, Microsoft and Google providing free cloud services with very limited resources, and in that scenario, "heavy" websites on IIS could be the issue. In other situations - performance is good.

Incentivized

As mentioned earlier there is so much documentation or guides or stack overflow questions out there that someone will have faced the same or very similar scenario to what you are going through that you will almost certainly find a solution to what you are after.

Incentivized

Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.

Incentivized

On Windows, Microsoft IIS is easier to implement and maintain than Apache web service. Normally if you need to host PHP or other apache native content on a Windows server, it's recommended to use WAMP or equivalent software to simplify the installation, administration, and configuration of resources. However, you can use Microsoft IIS and other web services on the same server, taking care to keep separate folders and port usage for each system.

Incentivized

All of those are paid solutions with very good features, but they also offer dedicated scenarios for web application hosting. If you run applications on on-premises web servers and don't have a Microsoft licence agreement, Nginx is a very good and reliable option, based on Linux distributions and available as freeware.

Incentivized

Microsoft IIS Server is scalable if the underlying server configuration is done correctly. Use x64 edition v/s 32bit and using 32bit mode application pools are some of the tweaks to be done to make the IIS server scalable. There are too many small configurations need to be carried out in order to make a highly scalable IIS server hence not giving full score in this area.

Incentivized

• Speed of development. You don't need to be an expert to expose your website through some DNS
• Robust, there has never been any downtime because of IIS itself.
• The ease of use can have (and has had) some negative impact because it's too easy to implement something, and then forget. When a server is taken down, those unthoughtful implementations come to light the hard way.

Incentivized

• Our websites are noticeably faster, causing an increase in customer satisfaction.
• Nginx has such a low memory/resource footprint that we save money from not needing multiple large, expensive servers.
• Ability to load balance traffic, have server-redundancy, and have high-availability allows for 100% uptime and provides cost-effective solutions to alternatives that can cost a lot.

Incentivized