The first Microsoft webserver was a research project by the European Microsoft Windows NT Academic Centre (EMWAC), part of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and was distributed as freeware. However since the EMWAC server was unable to scale sufficiently to handle the volume of traffic going to microsoft.com, Microsoft was forced to develop its own webserver, IIS.

 

IIS was initially released as an additional set of Internet based services for Windows NT 3.51. IIS 2.0 followed, adding support for the Windows NT 4.0 operating system; and IIS 3.0 introduced the Active Server Pages dynamic scripting environment.

 

IIS 4.0 dropped support for the Gopher protocol and was bundled with Windows NT as a separate "Option Pack".

 

The current shipping version of IIS is 7.0 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, 6.0 for Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, and IIS 5.1 for Windows XP Professional. Windows XP has a restricted version of IIS 5.1 that supports only 10 simultaneous connections and a single web site.IIS 6.0 added support for IPv6. A FastCGI module is also available for IIS5.1, IIS6 and IIS7.

 

IIS 7.0 is not installed by Windows Vista by default but it can be selected from the list of optional components. It is available in all editions of Windows Vista including Home Basic. IIS 7 on Vista does not limit the number of allowed connections as IIS on XP did but limits concurrent requests to 10 (Windows Vista Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise Editions) or 3 (Vista Home Premium). Additional requests are queued which hampers performance but they are not rejected as with XP.

 

Contact HavenZone Networking to find out more about Microsoft IIS and how HavenZone can configure Microsoft IIS for your company.