The client sends a request and receives a response if all goes well. Web servers typically handle requests using a request-response pattern. The thread-per-request model that IIS (and its lightweight cousin IIS Express) uses will grab a thread from a thread pool for each request. Although the single-thread model (Node.js, for example) has some worker threads available, it typically only uses them for certain kinds of work, such as file system access. The two main process models for web servers are to either handle all requests on a single thread, or to spawn a new thread for each request. There are countless options for how the web server can process those requests. What the web server does with the traffic from there depends. You could specify the port number if you’d like, and for TLS ( Transport Layer Security).Īssuming the default configuration and TLS is configured for your web application, the web server will receive all inbound traffic to ports 80 and 443. Visiting will send your request to port 80 implicitly. When you visit a website in your browser, you don’t typically specify the port number unless the web server is configured to receive traffic on ports other than the default. For example, the default port for HTTP traffic is 80, and the one for HTTPS is 443. The web server allows an application to process messages that arrive through specific TCP ports (by default). But what exactly is a web server? Let’s define that in the abstract so we can have some context for how IIS fills this role.Ī web server is a process for hosting web applications. And the internet cannot exist without web servers. “Tervetuloa!”īut before we dig into the nitty-gritty of IIS, let’s start by defining a web server in a general sense. Once it’s installed you’ll see this welcome page in your browser. It’s versatile and stable, and it’s been widely used in production for many years. (There are other options, which I’ll present later). While it’s possible to run IIS on Linux and Macs using Mono, it’s not recommended and will likely be unstable.

Let’s get started! What Is an IIS Web Server?Īn IIS web server runs on the Microsoft. And after we’ve established a baseline with managing IIS using the GUI, you’ll see how to work with it using the CLI. You’ll learn how to enable it on Windows.

We’ll look at what it does and how it works. In this post, we’re going to take a close look at IIS (Internet Information Services).

Iis manager