Secrets of Web Site Hosting with Internet Information Services (IIS)

XP Professional includes a free, built-in web server. If you’re planning on using it, check out these tips to improve your site’s performance, cut down on bandwidth, deliver pages faster, and reduce Page Not Found errors.

If you’ve wanted to host a web server but don’t want to go to the trouble of configuring a separate machine and server, XP Professional has help for you. Windows XP Professional comes with Internet Information Services (IIS) Version 5.1, which lets you host web sites and FTP sites and run a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) service for sending email. (The Home Edition doesn’t include any of these capabilities.) It’s not something you’ll use to build a substantial web site because it has some significant drawbacks. The web server and FTP server allow only 10 simultaneous connections, for example, and the SMTP server isn’t a full-blown mail server; it can act as only a relay.