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I've been using IIS express to host a test web site for a couple of months using an always on netbook. I've assigned a domain name to the IP of the netbook. I don't use the netbook for anything other than IIS express. It seems to me that this might be a good option for hosting a personal web site. I have another web site on a shared hosted environment and the IIS express one is a lot faster. What I want to know is, what are the downsides of hosting a web site with IIS express? I don't think there are any licensing issues. I think there may be some security issues with commercial web sites. The main problem I have found it that windows periodically reboots after an update - but I have solved that problem by running a batch file to start IIS express at start up. What is the consensus?

Steve Mc
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  • How you can start IIS Express after windows is rebooted ? running bat file requires user to log on but this is not possible with standalone server – Andrus Oct 24 '11 at 15:21

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IIS Express was meant to be used as local development server. So it is not adviced to use for externally facing sites for some of the following reasons...

1.IIS Express runs as current logged on user. So it is not a good idea to run externally accessible sites. If at all you want to run a site, make sure that you created a low privilege account and run your site in that account.

2.Sites hosted in IIS Express will be slow because by default failed request tracing and console tracing are enabled (failed request tracing can be disabled by editing applicationhost.config file)

3.Kernel mode caching is not supported

4.There is no UI to configure IIS Express

(In the above first issue is serious security issue)

vikomall
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  • I knew about point 1. I assume that this means that if there are any exploits within IIS or your own application then any malicious code would run under the user that IIS is running on. This may be something a developer might be willing to risk in the name of research. – Steve Mc Jul 06 '11 at 18:29
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    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4931374/how-to-run-iis-express-as-a-process-started-via-a-windows-service describes how to run iis7express with non-administrative rights. console tracing is not enabled. kernel mode caching is enabled in iis7express in config file by default. Webmatrix can used to configure iis express 7 using GUI. So it looks like all point are wrong and iis 7 express can easily used to serve web site. – Andrus Oct 24 '11 at 15:18