PC-WEEK: September 18, 1996 _ Top six web servers and NOVL is not even mentioned.
Web servers worth buying
IIS comes with Windows NT's server, but competitors have more to offer
By Jim Rapoza
With this month's release of Windows NT 4.0, Microsoft Corp. is telling companies that they no longer need to worry about
choosing a World Wide Web server because its Internet Information Server 2.0 is part of the operating system.
But except for its top-notch speed and the fact that it comes
with the server version of NT 4.0 for no extra cost, IIS 2.0 is
an average Web server that doesn't stand out in any way.
Companies will find that the latest servers from other vendors
offer more features and flexibility that justify their price tags.
Foremost among the six Web servers reviewed here is Netscape Communications Corp.'s $995 Enterprise Server 2.0, which shipped in July. In PC Week Labs' tests, Enterprise Server emerged as an Analyst's Choice, providing the best combination of strong features and fast performance and running on more than a half-dozen platforms, including all versions of Windows NT as well as most Unix systems.
For companies that want a Web server that runs on Windows 95 as well as earlier versions of Windows NT, three more products also bear a close look.
The Internet Factory Inc.'s Commerce Builder 2.0, released this month for $495, is a major improvement over the previous version. Version 2.0 is better integrated with Windows NT and has excellent remote administration capabilities and greatly improved performance.
Both O'Reilly & Associates' WebSite Professional 1.0, released in June for $499, and Luckman Interactive Inc.'s Web Commander 1.0, released in April for $249, take an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach, providing every utility needed to get a Web site up and running and a large collection of wizards to simplify the process. Although neither
product did well in our performance tests, they are fast enough
to handle most Internet and intranet sites.
And for sites interested in seeing why Unix is the dominant
platform for Web servers, Open Market Inc.'s Secure WebServer 2.0, which shipped in May for $1,495, proves the point. Secure WebServer is a good performer with an easy-to-use, browser-based interface for administration that lets the server be run by those who are not Unix gurus.
Merits of management
The administrator utility in Microsoft's IIS 2.0 is simple to use
but also very basic, giving users only a few configuration
options. PC Week Labs could manage several servers from a
single screen with IIS, but this can also be done with all the
other servers reviewed here except Open Market's Secure
WebServer and Internet Factory's Commerce Builder.
Commerce Builder and O'Reilly's WebSite Professional both have much more complete administration tools than IIS, providing control over almost every aspect of the server. But we found Enterprise Server's browser-based interface the best of the bunch; it not only is full of features and is made intuitive with JavaScript but also lets the server be managed from any system on the Web. Although the Open Market server's interface is also browser-based, it is less flexible than
Enterprise Server's.
Both Commerce Builder and IIS can be managed remotely via a browser, but not all configuration options are available that way. WebSite Pro and Web Commander can be remotely managed only over Windows NT networks.
For companies that want to use the Web for business, secure
transactions are essential, and all of the servers reviewed here
support SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). Enterprise Server is the only one that supports the new SSL 3.0. All of the servers except Commerce Builder let us centrally manage all SSL keys and certificates, and creating keys was easy on all of the servers.
These six servers also give users the option of keeping basic access logs or more thorough, extended ones. Enterprise Server and WebSite Pro go further, letting users choose exactly what information is logged, and Enterprise Server also has a built-in report generator. Open Market ships Secure WebServer with the company's excellent Web Reporter product for creating log reports.
All six servers let us control access to resources on a Web site
based on user groups or individual users. We could also control access based on IP address or domain name.
Commerce Builder, IIS and WebSite Pro are fully integrated with Windows NT's access control lists.
For companies just starting a Web site, WebSite Pro is by far the best package of these six. The O'Reilly server comes with an excellent HTML editor and image map tool, and its wizards helped us quickly create several Web pages. The WebView feature gave us a hierarchical tree view that made site management much easier.
Web Commander comes with a similar set of very useful tools,
including a version of the Incontext Spider called WebStudio, but we found these tools to be slightly behind those included with WebSite Pro. Also making WebSite Pro more attractive to those building their first Web site are two excellent manuals that are more like books.
For basic HTML editing, Enterprise Server comes with Netscape's Navigator Gold, and IIS includes Microsoft's FrontPage.
Indicating how confusing it can be to develop Web-based applications, all of the servers except Web Commander come with their own programming language. However, all of the servers support CGI (Common Gateway Interface), and Commerce Builder and WebSite Pro support several APIs,including Microsoft's Internet Server API.
Only the Open Market server lacks database support; the rest
could be linked to databases either directly or through ODBC
(Open Database Connectivity).
Where do they run?
As noted earlier, Enterprise Server has the most extensive
cross-platform support of the six. Like Netscape's server, the
Open Market server runs on most versions of Unix.
The fact that Commerce Builder, Web Commander and WebSite Pro run on Windows 95 as well as NT makes them especially appealing for companies planning to build small,low-volume Web sites. When Microsoft released Windows NT 4.0, it limited the number of Web connections allowed
using NT Workstation, which makes Windows 95 a better option for companies that want to start small.
(For more about the Internet capabilities of NT 4.0, see the
special report in this issue. For a Tech View on the impact of
Microsoft's license limits, see "NT 4.0 license, not speed, is
key.")
Commerce Builder is the only server we tested that includes a
proxy server, and we found it to be competitive with many
stand-alone proxy servers. Using it, we could daisy- chain
servers to limit the load on a single machine, we could cache
frequently accessed Web pages and we could control where
users went on the Internet.
For creating searchable indexes on a Web site, Enterprise
Server comes with the Verity search engine, and Web
Commander includes the Excite and WAIS search engines.
Microsoft has included its new Index Server with NT 4.0,
making the utility readily accessible to IIS users. WebSite Pro's
WebIndex was the easiest indexing utility to use .
Both Commerce Builder and Web Commander come with extra features that are useful for those building an intranet. Commerce Builder let us create newsgroups for topic-based forums and discussions, and we could also set up areas on a Web site for real-time conferencing using the server's chat feature. Web Commander includes the SLmail95 SMTP/Post
Office Protocol 3 mail server from Seattle Lab.
When running under Windows NT 4.0, Commerce Builder, Enterprise Server and IIS 2.0 performed very well in PC Week Labs' tests. Although Web Commander and WebSite Pro scored poorly in our tests, both can easily fill a T-1 line, meaning that most Internet sites will see little difference between these servers and the fast ones. Only Commerce
Builder has more than the most basic options for performance
tuning.
Technical Analyst Jim Rapoza can be contacted at jim_rapoza@zd.com.
Test Methodology
PC Week Labs tested the six Web servers reviewed here
using Silicon Graphics Inc.'s WebStone, which is available for
free on the Internet. WebStone simulates the load from varying
numbers of clients and measures the number of connections a
server handles per second, the average throughput and the
average response time to requests.
We ran WebStone on a Silicon Graphics Indy workstation
running Irix Release 5.3. We tested the Windows NT-based
Web servers on a Dell Computer Corp. Dimension XPS Pro
150 with 64M bytes of RAM and tested the Web servers that
run Unix on a Sun Microsystems Inc. SPARC IPX running
Solaris 2.5. Because the Dell and Sun machines are not
comparable, we did not include results obtained on the Sun
machine in our benchmark chart.
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