Item: Microsoft IIS
Rating: 8
Author: John Glenn

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use IIS in a number of different ways. Some of our homegrown .NET apps run internally on our network as well as several other boxed software installs that require the use of IIS. Our current setup involves about 6 servers all running the latest version of IIS and they seem to be easy to work with and are patched fairly regularly by our staff.

Pros and Cons

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.

Return on Investment

It has provided a free platform to host several of our in house developed applications.
We have also had to spend a lot of time moving from 6 to 7.5 with code changes that were built into the latest releases.
When it comes to boxed software we typically choose to load the application on IIS, when given the choice, due to its ease of install and mostly hassle free deployment.
We have had some difficulty tracking down problems in the past but the newer versions seem to help out more with troubleshooting.

Alternatives Considered

Apache Tomcat and Nginx

Apache and Nginx are what we use for our large websites and public data. When dealing with the type of traffic we see on our sites IIS just doesn't scale out well. For our staff levels, Apache and Nginx are very hard to support for all of our projects so we can't always use them. IIS seems to fit the bill here for those smaller deployments. Again, it's not my first choice for a lot of connections or for big data. I save those for the Linux servers.

Other Software Used

WhatsUp Gold, Networker, EMC VNX

Likelihood to Recommend

It is perfect for small dev projects where you would like to put the data into SQL. Put IIS together with SQL Express and you have a fairly robust application space for free! If you are passing along a big data site I don't think that IIS would be your best bet. It does offer clustering, which is the IIS answer to high volume, but that can get pricey with multiple server instances and licensing for the OS.

To IIS or not to IIS?

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft IIS