Microsoft IIS

Host native Microsoft technology as ASPNET

Extension to expand technology support as SFTP, Node JS and PHP content

Easy to install and maintenance, including Farm center configuration

Scalable

Compatible with Cloud services and containers

Rich documentation and lots of community interaction

Integrated to Windows version. It is not possible to upgrade the Microsoft IIS version without upgrading the Windows version

Not easy to implement security recommendations as Top 10 OWASP, some times you need to edit the Windows registry, It sounds good for me.

Need to keep Windows update "updated." Frequently security paths are released by the Windows update channel.

Easy to setup

Easy to maintain

Works well with build/release pipelines in Azure devops

Angular/node apps don't run on IIS, or at least we never figured out how. Rather we ended up using nginx.

There are still occasional memory leaks - check your recycle settings!

If you have very heavy usage for web APIs, IIS requires regular restarts for reasons unknown.

Delegated remote management.

Admin tool center is great.

Scalable web infrastructure when needed.

The installation process had bugs.

The pricing structure was confusing.

The diagnostic tools could have a better UX.

Scaling

Connections

SSL

Authentication and Security

Configuration

Connection Strings

Could be a little hard to use if you are just starting out

Has many configurations options you learn about when you hit an issue

Easily available on MS products.

Lightweight with no frills application suitable for most machines.

Works as it should 99.9% of the time.

Application and UI are outdated.

Convoluted to use for those not familiar.

A set up wizard would be a nice touch.

Microsoft familiarity

Already on most Windows machines

Fairly easy to setup a .NET application in it

Fairly robust

Complicated to configure if it's not out of the box

Shuts down app pools and applications after a certain amount of non-use time and makes it hard to stop this behavior--this makes running scheduled tasks with something like Hangfire in your app more difficult (you often need to pull this out into a Windows service or something), which I think is unnecessary

Quite slow when compared to modern open-source servers

Logging errors and things in EventViewer is hell--considering EventViewer on an under load Windows server can barely draw itself in under five minutes

Unlikable interface

Ease websites deployment

Strong integration Microsoft SQL

Microsoft Active Directory Authentication

Poor security

Application pools difficulties

The user interface is very clean and intuitive

The is almost no learning curve

Installation is very easy

There are some hidden and not very easy to find configurations that would have been better if completely left out, like machine.config. I understand the idea, but sometimes things are easier without trying to make things easy for you.

After 15 years of usage I still don't understand why IIS sometimes complains that I already used my *.domain https certificate for another website in the same domain.

There are too many versions... IIS should be a product with almost no other functionality than being a web server. It's not necessary to have imcompatible versions.

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.

There have been times where we have been concerned about the security vulnerabilities that IIS has been exposed to.

Logging in IIS is good but at times the error message are quite vague or point us in the wrong direction. More succinct and clear error messages would be nice.

Configuring IIS as a reverse proxy server has too many steps and is confusing at times.

Integrates with Active Directory to provide single sign-on with out prompting for a password

Simple and easy to deploy

Security Patches are included as part of OS Patching

Nothing comes to mind--product works as expected.

Website hosting.

URL rewriting.

Session hosting.

Limited built-in diagnosis.

Troubleshooting problems is very easy due to the server logs, which are maintained by default in Microsoft IIS.

Awesome integration with Visual Studio and dot NET applications.

Best performance with Microsoft tools and services, because of its native nature with them.

Microsoft IIS' performance, in comparison with lean web-servers like Nginx and Apache, has a lot of room for improvement.

Since it is a non-open source solution and a proprietary Microsoft software, it is tied with Microsoft Windows OS, which is prone to new security vulnerabilities on a frequent basis.

The logging of errors is very vague in nature sometimes, which makes it difficult to get to the root cause of the error, and means it takes more time in debugging.

Handle a decent amount of loads

Easily configurable

Simple UI to customize for different applications

Is memory-intensive

Has multi-threading issues

Cannot be used for connection pooling by itself

Microsoft IIS is very good at quickly and easily starting up a website

Microsoft IIS is excellent at hosting .net sites, this makes development and deployment seamless

Microsoft IIS is great for multiple domains pointing to the same sites

Microsoft IIS security could be more straightforward

Security can be difficult if you want to use a 3rd party claims authentication

Custom Handlers can be difficult to manage

IIS is easy to configure, quick to get up and running.

Ability to work with PowerShell

Separation of application pools for shared environments

Built in scalability options

Although it supports other technologies than .NET, it's not a straightforward process

Log files are difficult to find and read

Depends on Windows Server

Easy to deploy and minimum time for the first startup.

Supports a large variety of web technologies.

Easy website and applications management.

The best integration with Microsoft AD for user authentication.

It is regularly patched.

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.

Windows Authentication for Single Sign-On makes managing permission easier by using custom Active Directory groups

Serving static site files is incredibly easy

Allows for easy binding of ports and hostnames

Ease of integrating SSL certificates

Configuration of NodeJS application took effort with some undocumented loopholes

Deploying a NodeJS app with Single Sign-On was challenging when it came to asynchronous requests as OPTION requests do not include authorization and needed to be approved in an automated fashion prior to the NodeJS application being called

Easy access

User authentication

Multiple websites

We can browse and check the website then and there itself

[To] Stop and start running the applications are so simple in IIS

IP Masking or websites URL masking

Extensions

Ease of management. IIS is relatively easy to install, configure, monitor and troubleshoot.

Security. IIS is a large application, with known vulnerabilities and a relatively large attack surface.

Monitoring and logging. While much of the IIS infrastructure is easily interpreted, more meaningful error messages would be very useful. Arcane event/error messages that are only meaningful to the publisher are not especially useful to a business managing the product.

Ease of configuration. IIS Manager provides access to almost all of IIS functionality via an easy to use GUI.

Centralized Certificate Store means SSL certs can be centrally stored and referenced by various IIS installs.

Strong user base means issues can often be resolved quickly via forums, etc.

Some settings are not accessible via the GUI. This can obfuscate changes made directly by some application.

Setting up impersonation for security can be difficult.

Very easy to deploy new sites.

Great integration with Visual Studio .NET.

Easy to troubleshoot.

The SQL integration is also fairly seamless.

It seems like they don't do new version migrations easily. Newer versions of IIS have required that we change our web.config files to exclude certain portions.

Error messages can be vague if you didn't write them in yourself.

I would like there to be a way to snapshot instances of IIS without having to snapshot an entire server. Not as a pass/fail test but more as a consistent backup for site hacks and malware.

Largely expandable to meet different security requirements.

As a Microsoft product, documentation and other support resources are widely available.

High availability and robustness lead to low administrative overhead

Logging may be a little tricky without appropriate parsing tools.

Application pools may be misconfigured when built by an application. Sometimes manual performance tweaking is necessary.

Update cycle could be a little tighter but not a legitimate complaint

Support of application integration is a strength, many COTS applications are supported by Microsoft IIS.

Microsoft IIS on the Windows Server 2012 R2 platform is very configurable.

Easily configured for Active Directory authentication.

Compared to Apache, Microsoft IIS has a large memory footprint.

Microsoft regularly changes it's administrative utility, sometimes drastically, which causes a learning curve one version to the next.

With some applications you need to spend quite some time tuning Microsoft IIS to bring it to an acceptable level of performance.

Easy to set up.

Very easy to manage with the Microsoft IIS GUI.

Quick to load the applications.

Better custom logging generation line with Apache or Nginx.

The IIS SEO Toolkit is aging very well, and is still an important tool in our everyday website testing.

IIS makes it very easy for us to test URL rewriting and reverse proxies in advance of launching changes on live websites.

Website speed is so critical and IIS makes testing performance optimization strategies painless and quick.

Honestly, improvements over the years have been right in-line with our needs.

We're I to ask for anything, we'd love an IIS extension for the Log Parser Studio. Perhaps I'm just lazy.