Article Index
10 Easy Ways to Promote Your Website
5 Simple Steps to Accepting Payments
5 Steps to Understanding HTML
5 Ways to Avoid the 1998 Look
6 Reasons Why You Need a Website
7 Ways to Make Your Web Forms Better
A Question of Scroll Bars
Ads Under the Radar Linking to Affiliates
AJAX Should You Believe the Hype
All About Design Principles and Elements
An Introduction to Paint Shop Pro
An Issue of Width the Resolution Problem
Avoiding the Nuts and Bolts Content Management Software
Beware the Stock Photographer Picking Your Pictures
Building a Budget Website
Building Online Communities
Clean Page Structure Headings and Lists
ColdFusion Quicker Scripting at a Price
Column Designs with CSS
Content is King
CSS and the End of Tables
Cut to the Chase How to Make Your Website Load Faster
Designing for Sales
Designing for Search Engines
Dont Be Scared Its Only Code HTML for Beginners
Dreamweaver The Professional Touch
Encryption and Security with SSL
Finding a Good HTML Editor
Focus on the User Task Oriented Websites
Fonts are More Important Than You Think
Free Graphics Alternatives
FrontPage Easy Pages
Hints All the Way
Hiring Professionals 5 Things to Look For
How Databases Work
How the Web Works
How to Get Your Website Talked About on Blogs
How to Install and Configure a Forum
How to Make Visitors Add You to Their Favorites
How to Run Ads Without Driving Visitors Crazy
How to Set Up Your Hosting in 5 Minutes Flat
IIS and ASP Microsofts Server
Image Formats GIF JPEG PNG and More
Its a World Wide Web Going International
JSP Java on Your Server
LAMP The Most Popular Server System Ever
Making Friends and Influencing People the Importance of Links
Making Searches Simple
Offering Free Downloads on Your Website
Opening a Web Shop with E Commerce Software
Perl Cryptic Power
Photoshop a Graphic Designers Dream
PHP Easy Dynamic Websites
Picking a Colour Scheme
Printing and Sending the Two Things Users Want to Do
Putting Multimedia to Good Use
Python and Ruby the Newer Alternatives
Registering a Domain Name
Registering Your Users by Stealth
RSS Really Simple Syndication
Setting Up a Mailing List
Setting up a Test Server on Your Own Computer
Some Places to Go For More Information
Taking HTML Further with Javascript
Taking HTML Further
Taking Your Website Mobile
Text Ads Unobtrusive Advertising
The 5 Principles of Effective Navigation
The Art of the Logo
The Basics of Web Forms
The Basics of Web Servers
The Case Against Flash
The Confusing World of Web Hosting Making Your Decision
The Evils of PDFs
The Importance of Validation
The Many Flavours of HTML
The Smaller the Better Avoiding Graphical Overload
The Top 10 Biggest Web Design Mistakes
The Web Designers Toolbox
The Web is Not Paper
Theres More than One Web Browser
Time for User Testing
Titles and Headlines Its Not a Newspaper
Tracking Your Visitors
Understanding Web Jargon
Uploading Your Website with FTP
Using Flash Sensibly
Using Quizzes and Games to Get Traffic
VBScript Javascript Made Easy
Websites and Weblogs Whats the Difference
What Do You Want Your Website to Do
What You See Isnt Always What You Get
Which Database is Right for You
Why Doing It Yourself is Best
Why Java Will Drive Your Visitors Away
Why Word is Bad for the Web
Why You Should Put Your Content in a Weblog Format
Why You Should Stick to Design Conventions
Working With Templates
Writing for the Web

IIS and ASP Microsofts Server

IIS and ASP: Microsoft's Server.

Despite Microsoft's dominance of everything to do with computers, their web server software sits on a relatively low 20% market share, thanks to the popularity of Apache. However, 20% of millions of servers is still a pretty substantial number of servers, and so IIS (Internet Information Server) can't be written off that quickly.

IIS and Security.

Among technical people, though, IIS is mainly known for its terrible security record, most famously when a security hole allowed the Code Red worm (a kind of virus) to spread between IIS servers back in 2001 . Microsoft was forced to issue press releases asking people to secure their servers, which meant that millions of webmasters had to go to Microsoft’s website and download a patch to fix the problem. This prompted many people to go and download Apache instead, so the same thing wouldn't happen again.
Most of IIS' security holes were caused by services that most people don't use, simply because they were left on by default. Once an attacker was in, the damage they could do was greatly increased by the fact that IIS ran with all the security privileges available on the system – essentially, once someone got past IIS' lacking security, they could do anything to the system.

For the latest version, Microsoft finally turned off unnecessary services and made the server run with fewer privileges, creating a much more secure web server. However, most of the IIS servers on the Internet today are not running the latest version, as the only way to get it is to upgrade to the Windows Server 2003 operating system – there are plenty of people still running IIS 5 on Windows 2000.

IIS and Stability.

Another prominent criticism of IIS is that it has a tendency to fail under heavy loads, as it can't handle very many connections at once. If you've ever seen an error that says something like 'Website Too Busy', the chances are that IIS was responsible for it.

So Why Would Anyone Use IIS?

The primary reason anyone uses IIS is that they created their website using Microsoft's software. This usually means that their database is Microsoft SQL, and their pages are written using ASP (Active Server Pages), the latest version being ASP.Net. ASP is easy to use, as most scripts are written in a Visual Basic-like language named VBScript, and comes with a slick environment that makes it easy to rapidly develop dynamic websites.

In the latest .Net version, servers can actually run whole programs using the Visual Basic .Net and C# programming languages. This is a powerful feature, allowing full-fledged programming languages to be used to generate HTML pages, and Microsoft counts on it to differentiate ASP from other solutions.

As recently as 2001, ASP was the leading solution for dynamic web pages (it was beaten by PHP the next year), and it still ha a lot of momentum. Open source languages can seem unreliable to managers, and they were often unwilling to make the change from technology that had the backing of a big company like Microsoft. Companies are now starting to make the change, although quite a few are c to Java instead of PHP.

IIS Alternatives.

Since so many people want to switch away from IIS, a market has opened up in helping them to do so while letting them keep their ASP code – after all, it wouldn't be any good if they had to start over in PHP, would it? The best solution is made by Sun, and you can see it at www.sun.com/software/chilisoft. Unfortunately, that software costs $500, so it's only really worth it if you have a lot of code tied up in an ASP language.

Really, the best thing to do is to stay away from IIS to begin with – yes, it's easy to write web pages in VBScript, and, yes, IIS does come for free with Windows, but in the long run it really isn't worth the hassle.