title: WCF hosting for middle tier
body: <p>We're developing a new middle tier for our application suite.  We're looking to rewrite our business logic and data access layers in C#, as they are currently in VB6 and published via COM+.</p>
  
  <p>What we're trying to decide is how exactly to make this middle tier available to different clients.  We'll be using WCF to do this, and we've decided that we'll use a variety of bindings in order to facilitate each different client's needs, including a netTcpBinding for our desktop app, a net.Tcp and/or named pipe binding for an internet app running either locally or on a machine within the network, and some flavor of HTTP binding for an external web API.</p>
  
  <p>What we're trying to decide is how to host our service.  It seems like most places I go to say IIS is the way to go, but it seems like you'd get better performance out of the BLL/DAL portion of it if it was under a Windows Service, and @marc_s here on SO seems to recommend self-hosting more often than not.  So do we host it under IIS, under a service, or some hybrid where perhaps a thin service is hosted in IIS for the HTTP endpoint and consumes the main service via a net.tcp or named pipe binding?  Separating it out allows for there to be a physical separation if desired, as well as allowing for the possibility of IIS going down, which would still leave the service running for those clients that access the endpoints it publishes.</p>
  
  <p>Also, what about scalability and reliability?  Is there much difference between the two hosting environments that way?</p>
  
  <p>I realize there's a lot of questions similar to this, but I haven't been able to find quite the information I've been looking for, so links to more concrete help work just as well as an answer.</p>