Windows Server 2003 Web Edition

Windows Server 2003 comes in a new Web Edition that is designed to provide a less-expensive way to deploy Web sites and applications built on Microsoft Web technologies such as Internet Information Services (IIS) and ASP.NET.

Web Edition is targeted at organizations that host their own intranet or Internet sites. Microsoft is promoting Web Edition as being particularly well-suited for the user interface tier of n-tier applications built with Microsoft ASP.NET technology. (See the illustration “Web Edition as Application Front End“.) Web Edition can also be used to implement all aspects of a relatively simple, non-database-intensive site on a single self-contained machine. (Note that Web Edition is also targeted at network service providers who resell access to Microsoft software and must conform to a completely different set of licensing models and rules that are outside the scope of this report.)

Web Edition retails for US$399 per server and does not require Client Access Licenses (CALs). Web Edition was introduced, in large part, to provide a cost-competitive alternative to open-source Web server technologies, sometimes referred to as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PERL/PHP).