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WCF - IIS and User Hosts

I have been working with WCF quite widely for more than two years and almost always took the “lazy” route and deployed everything through IIS. Some of the reading I've done lately starts with the fact that developers use user hosts in Windows services or in console applications. Are there any significant advantages to moving to this paradigm, or is my current strategy for hosting everything in IIS giving me everything I need to work with WCF?

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When you go to your own hosting, you limit the scalability and reliability of your services. If scalability is not a concern, you should still consider all the service monitoring features you need to create to make sure your services are working reliably.

If I had to choose two reasons to prefer self-service IIS, it would be the flexibility of the WAS Instance Model for IIS 7.x and the Windows Server AppFabric Properties for WCF 4.

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If you are using IIS (5 or 6) prior to WAS, Windows services may be your best (only?) Good bet for hosting WCF services that communicate over named pipes or netTCP (anything other than HTTP).

In the third release of WCF Services programming (link), Lowy suggests using the Windows Server AppFabric in some situations and offers several options for self-hosting - when you need to use the service bus, and IIS 7.5 is not available for example. Pages 22 and 23 show some simple diagrams to help you determine when to use your own hosting through IIS, WAS, or AppFabric. I think the first chapter (maybe more) is available for free if you get a Kindle sample.

Apart from these scenarios, I'm not sure why you ever wanted to choose any independent hosting through WAS. I am curious to know if anyone has a good reason.

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