Visual studio having It own ASP.NET Engine which is capable enough to run Asp.net web application from visual studio. So we just click on Run button to start the application.

Now this is the scenarios of local environment. But If we want to host it on server from where all user can access the sites then IIS comes into the picture.

IIS provides a redesigned WWW architecture that can help you achieve better performance, reliability, scalability, and security for our Web sites. IIS can support following Protocol HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SMTP Etc. We need to host the site on IIS, when request comes from client it first hits the IIS Server, then the server passed it to ASP.NET worker process to execute. Then the response also passes to client via IIS itself.

Note only Hosting of Site we can create our FTP Server, SMTP Server using IIS itself.

There are different version of IIS available like 5.1, 6.0, 7.0 etc.