What is IIS (Internet Information Services)?

Internet Information Services or IIS also refer to Internet Information Server. It is a Web server product offered by Microsoft. IIS is developed as a direct competition to Apache and requires Windows Operating System unlike its counterpart that runs on Linux Operating System.

Microsoft Internet Information Systems is a popular platform to host various applications although the same was offered as just an add-on during the days of Windows NT. There were many issues due to its vulnerabilities in terms of security as far the initial versions of IIS were concerned that did include Code Red Virus, which lead to development of Microsoft\'s fundamental patches.

Subsequent and the latest versions of IIS are supported with out of the box security features in addition to some of the third party security tools. IIS needs support of PHP manager since most of the Web applications are written in PHP language and managing PHP stack was an overwhelming task for Windows admins.

IIS webs servers can be considered good candidates for server virtualization by addressing hardware consumption, server placement, and fault tolerance. Modern versions of IIS including IIS7 have been added with all the features of a modern web server in addition to tightly integrated ASP.NET.