What is PWS – Personal Web Server? Definition and brief description of PWS

PWS – Personal Web Server

Microsoft’s version of a web-server which is smaller in scale and intended for individual PC owners who wish to share information from their hard drive.

PWS is similar to Microsoft’s larger web-server IIS, or Internet Information Server but much smaller. PWS is able to be used in conjunction with Microsoft’s FrontPage, a product for designing websites.

Doing this lets users upload web-pages via a remote location, or to a local hard drive, and enables the user to create directories, set parameters, or check for dead links. PWS is popular in the trend of peer-to-peer publishing and exchange.

There are two components to PWS, a HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) server and a FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server.

These two servers work independently of one another and can be ran at the same time or separately.

The \Inetpub\Wwwroot folder for your home page and the files you want available through FTP are created by the PWS. The user than can create a subdirectory of structure under the PWS created directory.

Mac users have similar software with the same acronym called Personal Web Sharing.