Mastering Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0

8.2. Web Applications

Let's move another layer up the chain and look at web applications. Say you do want to enable Self-Service Site Creation, with Automatic Deletion enabled, but you don't want auto-deletion enabled on all your other sites. In this case, you'll need a new web application.

Web applications are what SharePoint uses to hold site collections. Every site collection has to reside in a web application, although a web application can contain many site collections. When SharePoint was installed, two web applications were created: your first site (in my example that's http://sp2/) and Central Administration (in this case, http://sp2:9876/). A web application is essentially comprised of two items that reside in IIS: an IIS Web Site and ...