A few months ago, I reported about the growth of sites running on IIS, which was edging closer and closer to Apache's market share. This month (July 2014), NetCraft's web server survey confirms that this has finally happened and IIS is now the market leader with close to 374 millions sites and a 37.5% share of the market.

To be fair, this specific statistic is only one out of many collected by Netcraft, and in some parameters, Apache still has a noticable lead because it is a solid product that gets the job doen for those who prefer it. What's important here for us at Microsoft is that fact that the growth shows that IIS is moving in the right direction, and that our customers are able to take advantage of the new features we have been introducing regularly (some specifically architected to cater to the need of high-end environments like hosters, enterprises and cloud providers).

Configuring websites can be a tedious task, especially if you have large systems to manage, such as hosting providers do. If you are tired of doing this sort of thing manually, Visual Studio Magazine has published a detailed guide on using .Net code to do this for you.

This allows creating new sites, creating app pools and customizing configuration, all from managed code, and can save a lot of time for developers and system administrators.

For more information, visit the article.

Logging the traffic coming into a website is very important, but on a busy site, the log can generates many gigabytes of data every day, making it hard to control disk-space and prevent the drives from filling up.

As a result, many users turn off logging completely, although this can make it impossible to track down suspicious or illegal activity. The good news is that there are multiple ways to keep a tight leash on log size without turning logging off. The following article by Jim Van De Erve discusses several methods, from simple disk compression to a 3rd party tool that trims the logs automatically.

Click here to read more

After my blog post on the topic, questions continue to flow about the effect it has on Windows, Azure and IIS. A lot of the question really show how confusing SSL technology is to many people. Much has been written about HeartBleed, and it wouldn't be right to just repeat it all, so for those seeking additional info, I recommend reading this article on WindowsIT Pro by Rod Trent. It covers the topic and summarizes it well, and also links to several posts (including mine) for further reading.

Most people think Azure’s portal is terrific, and especially the new version, but for those of us who have been using IIS Manager to operate their local servers, using the same familiar interface to manage their cloud has been high on the wishlist. Recently, we finally made it happen, and you can now control your server through the SCM (Site Control Management) extension.

To do this, you can use the IIS manager as-is, without any need for special installation. The trick is connecting to a special URL which exposes the properties and allows the console to connect remotely. For full details on doing this, read this blog post.