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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Web Servers
  5. Microsoft IIS vs lighttpd

Microsoft IIS vs lighttpd

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Microsoft IIS
Microsoft IIS
Stacks15.5K
Followers7.7K
Votes236
lighttpd
lighttpd
Stacks156
Followers133
Votes27

lighttpd vs Microsoft IIS: What are the differences?

lighttpd: A secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible web-server that has been optimized for high-performance environments. lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems; Microsoft IIS: A web server for Microsoft Windows. Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

lighttpd and Microsoft IIS can be categorized as "Web Servers" tools.

"Lightweight" is the primary reason why developers consider lighttpd over the competitors, whereas "Great with .net" was stated as the key factor in picking Microsoft IIS.

Intuit, Accolade, and CampusBookRentals are some of the popular companies that use Microsoft IIS, whereas lighttpd is used by WhatsApp, Frame, and Fusionbox. Microsoft IIS has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1498 company stacks & 312 developers stacks; compared to lighttpd, which is listed in 15 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.

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Advice on Microsoft IIS, lighttpd

greg00m
greg00m

Mar 9, 2020

Needs advice

I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities.
Ready, aim fire!

766k views766k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Microsoft IIS
Microsoft IIS
lighttpd
lighttpd

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Statistics
Stacks
15.5K
Stacks
156
Followers
7.7K
Followers
133
Votes
236
Votes
27
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 83
    Great with .net
  • 55
    I'm forced to use iis
  • 27
    Use nginx
  • 18
    Azure integration
  • 15
    Best for ms technologyes ms bullshit
Cons
  • 1
    Hard to set up
Pros
  • 7
    Lightweight
  • 6
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Proxy
  • 2
    Virtal hosting
  • 2
    Simplicity

What are some alternatives to Microsoft IIS, lighttpd?

NGINX

NGINX

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

Apache HTTP Server

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Unicorn

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Passenger

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

Jetty

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

Swoole

Swoole

It is an open source high-performance network framework using an event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking I/O model which makes it scalable and efficient.

Puma

Puma

Unlike other Ruby Webservers, Puma was built for speed and parallelism. Puma is a small library that provides a very fast and concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby web applications.

Caddy

Caddy

Caddy 2 is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go.

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