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Ten things to do with IIS

Evolt.org: “It would be nice if everything ran in a vacuum so that when something goes wrong you know what caused it, but in the real world most software is dependent on other software. ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, JSP, Perl are no different... they run on top of IIS. Here’s a list of ten ways to make IIS the best it can be.”

I’ve been stuck with IIS at work for 3 years now. My opinion, considering the hardships of those years is to skip this article and get Apache running on inexpensive Linux/*BSD servers. You save serious money and trouble.

If you are still stuck with IIS, here are the excerpts from the article.

1. Patch, patch, patch!
2. Secure your server with simple fixes
3. Tune your server
4. Cache your content
5. GZip site content
6. Add browser detection
7. Rewrite your URLs using IIS ReWrite or ISAPI ReWrite
8. Add spell checking to your URLs
9. Dive into MetaBase
10. Customize your error pages

Simple reality is that, open source software is usually fixed much faster, and still gives me the opportunity to fix things myself. In many of these points like rewriting URLs, Gzip contents etc. IIS is playing catch up with Apache. Why would one want to go for non-free, immature and closed source software that needs expensive hardware to run; when you have free, mature and open-source software that runs easily on light hardware?