Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS) is a scaled-down web server software for Windows operating systems. It has fewer features than Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) and its functions have been superseded by IIS and Visual Studio. Microsoft officially supports PWS on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, and Windows NT 4.0. Prior to the release of Windows 2000, PWS was available as a free download as well as included on the Windows distribution CDs. PWS 4.0 was the last version and it can be found on the Windows 98 CD and the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack.

Personal Web Server was originally created by Vermeer Technologies, the same company which created Microsoft FrontPage, before they were acquired by Microsoft. It was installed by FrontPage versions 1.1 to 98 as well.

Since Windows 2000 and FrontPage 2000, PWS was replaced by IIS as a standard Windows component. Windows Me and Windows XP Home Edition support neither PWS nor IIS, although PWS can be installed on Windows Me. In other editions of Windows XP, IIS is included as standard.

Coordinates: 47°38′22.55″N 122°7′42.42″W / 47.6395972°N 122.12845°W / 47.6395972; -122.12845

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, United States that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions. Established on April 4, 1975 to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, Microsoft rose to dominate the home computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. Microsoft is one of the largest software corporations in the world.

Microsoft would also come to dominate the office suite market with Microsoft Office. The company has diversified into the video game industry with the Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles and the consumer electronics and digital services market MSN, the Zune and the Windows Phone OS. The ensuing rise of stock in the company's 1986 initial public offering (IPO) made an estimated three billionaires and 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees (Forbes 400 list revealed that in March 2011 both Jon Shipley and Nathan Myhrvold lost their billionaire status). In May 2011, Microsoft Corporation acquired Skype Communications for $8.5 billion.

A personal web server is an appliance that allows users to store and access private files remotely from any device connected to the web. A personal web server might just be an occasional user's computer loaded with the requisite software for remote management or a dedicated high-end computer with dedicated network hardware and software. We can compare a personal web server as a primary example of e-commerce application.

Web server can refer to either the hardware (the computer) or the software (the computer application) that helps to deliver Web content that can be accessed through the Internet.

The most common use of web servers is to host websites, but there are other uses such as gaming, data storage or running enterprise applications.

The primary function of a web server is to deliver web pages on the request to clients using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). This means delivery of HTML documents and any additional content that may be included by a document, such as images, style sheets and scripts.

A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initiates communication by making a request for a specific resource using HTTP and the server responds with the content of that resource or an error message if unable to do so. The resource is typically a real file on the server's secondary memory, but this is not necessarily the case and depends on how the web server is implemented.

While the primary function is to serve content, a full implementation of HTTP also includes ways of receiving content from clients. This feature is used for submitting web forms, including uploading of files.