Integral to my organization's infrastructure but lacking compared to Linux counterparts
May 10, 2021

Integral to my organization's infrastructure but lacking compared to Linux counterparts

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft IIS

Microsoft IIS is being used by my organization to serve business and scientific applications for users in the organization and externally. The applications are a mixture of ASP.NET, .NET MVC, and more recently .NET Core. It is an integral part of our IT services, and each instance often serves over 10 applications.
  • 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
  • Serves multiple applications quite well
  • Fairly easy to set up
  • Well supported by Microsoft
  • Microsoft familiarity
  • Already on Windows Server machines
  • Improved time to market for some applications due to quick setup times
  • Re-use of existing infrastructure
  • Saves money
After using both Microsoft IIS and free Linux alternatives, like NGINX and Apache, I have to say I much prefer the Linux products in every way. Configuration is clearer (you have to edit config files deep in Linux somewhere, but once you've done it once, it's easy). Logging is better and simpler (no awful EventViewer). NGINX and Apache tend to be much faster, more robust, and they don't shut anything down--they serve things forever. Microsoft IIS is continually shutting things down and then when the next request comes in, it takes too long to get things running again to serve it.

Do you think Microsoft IIS delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Microsoft IIS's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft IIS live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Microsoft IIS go as expected?

No

Would you buy Microsoft IIS again?

No

Microsoft IIS is well suited if you already have the expensive Windows Server infrastructure--it will already be on there, most likely (or not very hard to get on if it isn't). If you are going to serve static sites or some kind of .NET (including Core) application, it is the obvious choice. If you are going to serve a PHP or Node.JS application behind it, I wouldn't--I'd recommend getting all the better and free tools like Linux, NGINX, Apache, etc. to do that for you--you'll save money and time.

Microsoft IIS Feature Ratings

IDE support
5
Security management
5
Administration and management
2
Application server performance
5
Installation
8
Open-source standards compliance
3