Internet Information Services (IIS)

What is Internet Information Services (IIS)?

IIS is an acronym for Internet Information Services, a web server developed by Microsoft and included as standard in many Windows operating systems.

Unlike cross-platform web servers, such as Apache, IIS is only available for Windows operating systems.

Microsoft first released IIS in May 1995.

IIS is rich with features. Most commonly, IIS is used to host ASP.NET web applications and static websites. It can also be used as an FTP server, and can be extended to host web applications built on other platforms such as Perl.

There are built-in authentication options with IIS such as Basic, ASP.NET, and Windows auth. The latter is useful if you have a Windows Active Directory environment, as users can be automatically signed into web applications using their domain account.

Other built-in security features include TLS certificate management and binding for enabling HTTPS and SFTP, request filtering for whitelisting or blacklisting traffic, authorization rules, and request logging.

Typically, IIS servers are found within corporate intranets. They are less commonly found serving public websites.