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What's good about IIS?
Not a lot. OK - it's fast.
It's configuration can easily be carried out by Internet Services Manager.
ASP is probably what it's most commonly used for.
What's wrong with IIS?
It's closed source, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. In IIS, it's
a bad thing, because the quality of the code isn't up to much. Also Microsoft
do take an age to release patches for serious security holes.
It's configuration files is held in a binary format - whatever happenned to
good old text, or at least something with what accounts to a useable
API. (ADSI is not usable).
It lacks the powerful modules of Apache, like mod_proxy and mod_rewrite,
and it's SSI support is weak when compared to xSSI.
This has lead to ASP becoming the dominant server side scripting language.
OK - it's fairly powerful. But ASP on IIS leaks memory if the ASP code is
not carefully written. All data connections should be closed, and all objects,
undefined before the end of a page.
The bottom line, is to keep IIS healthy and reactive, we found a daily restart
of IIS was required (not the machine), and we would recommend it to any IIS 5.0 hosting where
user's code cannot be trusted to be completely clean. Two minutes planned
downtime per day can prevent hours of downtime once IIS breaks.
What makes freeASPhost special?
Firstly, figuring out at an early stage that IIS could not be trusted,
allowed us to keep resources that might have easily been spent in upgrading
servers. We placed all IIS servers behind an
Apache "content switch", which passes requests back to the IIS webserver
once they have been vetted. Only GET, HEAD & POST HTTP requests are allowed,
and outgoing content is
compressed on-the-fly to save bandwidth. This unusual hybrid of Apache
and IIS as webservers, in fact, allows us the best of both pieces of
software, with relatively few headaches from the combination.
Also by carefully monitoring statistics and
availability of services, we become
aware of issues arising, which we can deal with at the earliest possiblity,
before it becomes a problem.
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