Microsoft IIS vs. Plesk

IIS as a web application server is perfectly suited for .net, .net core, asp.net applications. Our core ESB runs on IIS and has hundreds of gigabytes of data moved through it every day spread across millions of transactions. We have other mission critical applications that deliver our results to patients and doctors relying on IIS web application servers. If you stay in the Microsoft development stack, IIS is a top tier, efficient, and reliable web server.

Incentivized

The Plesk web hosting management platform is well suited for both novice web admins through to experienced technicians. While it allows experienced users to "get under the hood", those that are new to web hosting admin will quickly become comfortable with performing administration processes

Incentivized

• A big advantage that we use all the time is reviewing the logs that automatically get generated in IIS. It has helped us troubleshoot various problems in our applications over the years.
• IIS integrates really well with Visual Studio and TFS. We are able to quickly deploy new applications and changes to applications when requested by the business.
• IIS has proven that it is easy to configure and maintain with minimal effort.

Incentivized

• Automatically update the CMS, plugins, and templates of all your websites, depending on your CMS, all at the same time, with just a few strokes of your keyboard.
• Enables one to set up a schedule to back up your websites, automatically, and easily download/save the backup files off-site, for safety.
• Makes it easy for users to use a backup file to reinstall a website, with just a few strokes of the keyboard. Excellent service!

Incentivized

• For some web applications, it takes additional time to configure IIS to make a website work.
• IIS logging - it is not the strongest side of the product.
• Compared to Apache or Nginx, IIS uses way more system resources.
• Even with regular patches, IIS has many vulnerabilities.

Incentivized

• Better integration with independent WAF tools like Wordfence
• Create a simple function for staging sites and to push from staging to live
• Provide function to back-up DNS settings before making changes

Incentivized

We have no intention to replace all applications running on top of the IIS platform. Not all applications support other platforms and not all support staff are skilled in Linux/Apache platform support. Whereas IIS may not be the best performing or most secure web platform available, for the aforementioned reasons, it is impossible not to continue use of this product.

Incentivized

In general, Microsoft IIS is an alright product. It comes natively with Windows Server. It has good enough GUI to set things up & tweak things around. Once properly setup, it runs stably enough. And with enough Powershell magic, having a CI/CD pipeline to automatically deploy a new version of the application is doable.

Incentivized

ARR (application request routing) in Microsoft IIS Server enables the web-admins to increase the web app reliability and availability through the rule based routing and load balancing of HTTP requests which in turn provides highly available server. IIS 7.0 Manager also provides kernel as well as user mode caching for faster performance and in case if the server fails, the IIS server has good amount of details logged in its log files which help understand and debug the cause quickly. Load balancing facilitates IIS server to fight against availability issues.

Incentivized

In my experience, I have never had significant issues with IIS performance. Sometimes I've experienced issues with loading time, but it is mostly related to the web site code. However Amazon, Microsoft and Google providing free cloud services with very limited resources, and in that scenario, "heavy" websites on IIS could be the issue. In other situations - performance is good.

Incentivized

As mentioned earlier there is so much documentation or guides or stack overflow questions out there that someone will have faced the same or very similar scenario to what you are going through that you will almost certainly find a solution to what you are after.

Incentivized

On Windows, Microsoft IIS is easier to implement and maintain than Apache web service. Normally if you need to host PHP or other apache native content on a Windows server, it's recommended to use WAMP or equivalent software to simplify the installation, administration, and configuration of resources. However, you can use Microsoft IIS and other web services on the same server, taking care to keep separate folders and port usage for each system.

Incentivized

I've only ever really used cPanel-type web host control panels. CPanels are very cumbersome and clunky. They don't allow one to update all their hosted website's CMS, templates, and plugins, from within their system. This is a SERIOUS time- and headache-saver, in my opinion! I no longer have to log in to every single website and waste time updating the site. Also, backing up a database is pretty basic, but reinstalling a broken website with that backup doesn't always work. To date, I've never had a problem with reinstalling a website that I backed up, using the Plesk system.

Incentivized

Microsoft IIS Server is scalable if the underlying server configuration is done correctly. Use x64 edition v/s 32bit and using 32bit mode application pools are some of the tweaks to be done to make the IIS server scalable. There are too many small configurations need to be carried out in order to make a highly scalable IIS server hence not giving full score in this area.

Incentivized

• Speed of development. You don't need to be an expert to expose your website through some DNS
• Robust, there has never been any downtime because of IIS itself.
• The ease of use can have (and has had) some negative impact because it's too easy to implement something, and then forget. When a server is taken down, those unthoughtful implementations come to light the hard way.

Incentivized

• Time savings and eliminating redundancies.
• Reducing the need for multiple systems and spending on each.
• Creating more visibility into what teams are working on and getting projects done faster.

Incentivized