Does Number of Client Access Licenses Correlate with Number of Web Sites You Can Host?
Q: We bought 5 client access licenses with our Windows 2000 standard server. Does it mean that IIS only can host 5 web sites?
A: Licensing IIS servers is often misunderstood. Obtaining the right number of Client Access Licenses is important but that is only part of the story.
It all hinges on what you mean when you say you want to "host" web sites. Standard Licensing specifies that you may not use the software for "commercial hosting". So if you plan to sell the use of your IIS server like a web hosting provider does you are required to become a Microsoft Certified Partner and obtain proper licensing. There are two ways to meet this requirement, the most common of which is to purchase a Service Provider License Agreement. See
http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/licensing/default.asp for details. Once obtained, you are not limited to the number of sites you can host on a single server.
On the other hand, if, for example, your company makes paper airplanes and you wish to sell them using IIS on your server, you are not providing commercial hosting so you do not need a Service Provider License Agreement.
So what about Client Access Licenses? You need a Client Access License for every user that you authenticate with the local SAM or Active Directory, except for the IUSR_<servername> account using anonymous authentication. To quote from
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/howtobuy/pricing/model.asp, "Access to Internet sites by anonymous users does not require a CAL."
In other words, you can have five users authenticated to user accounts on your server and an unlimited number of anonymous users browsing IIS. This can all be with one web site or as many web sites as your server will manage. So, the number of CAL's is independent of the number of web sites you can host.