IIS stand for ( Internet Information Services ) formerly known as Internet Information Server. It is a web server produced by Microsoft. IIS is used with Microsoft Windows OSs and is the Microsoft centric competition to Apache, the most popular web server used with Unix/Linux-based systems. IIS is a group of Internet servers including a Web or Hypertext Transfer Protocol server and a File Transfer Protocol server with additional capabilities for Microsoft's Windows NT and Windows 2000 Server operating systems. IIS is Microsoft's entry to compete in the Internet server market that is also addressed by Apache, Sun Micro systems, O'Reilly, and others. With IIS, Microsoft includes a set of programs for building and administering Web sites, a search engine, and support for writing Web-based applications that access databases. Microsoft points out that IIS is tightly integrated with the Windows NT and 2000 Servers in a number of ways, resulting in faster Web page serving.