Comparing Web Servers for Windows NT
Three Servers Go Head to Head
By Tim Parker
Whether you want to publish a Web site for the Internet or for your own internal corporate network, you need a Web server (sometimes called an "HTTP daemon," because it provides HTTP services). Choosing a Web server for your Windows NT machine used to be relatively easy, because there were few choices. Now, there are a dozen or more server products, and the choice is not nearly as easy.
Recently, we identified several Web-server products for Windows NT. In many cases, you can download time-limited versions of Web-server software from vendors, but this can be frustrating. Some vendors want forms filled out online. This is followed by a waiting period for approval, after which an email explaining the download process is sent to you. Also, the software tends to be very large, so a typical analog modem can take hours to download and it is subject to many interruptions.
We assumed most Web administrators would want a physical package with documentation, put out by a company with a track record for quality and support. We eventually narrowed the field down to Luckman Interactive's Web Commander, O'Reilly and Associates' WebSite Professional, and Microsoft's Internet Information Server (See "Product Info"), all of which seem representative of what is available on the market.
All the software was loaded on two machines, one running the older Windows NT 3.51 (since many sites will not upgrade to 4.0 right away), and the other running the shipping version of Windows NT 4.0
