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Katana can host your services for you outside of IIS. You can use Web API and Nancy with it. I am sure someone has figured out how to setup servicestack as well.

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Yep! http://www.asp.net/aspnet/overview/owin-and-katana

Katana/OWIN provides a pipeline for hosting .NET web[sites|services] without IIS. This is another direction .NET is heading, no more IIS shackling (if you so choose)

Using the OWIN HttpListener rather than relying on IIS has been a godsend for many of the applications that we develop. IIS simply has too many knobs that users can twiddle and break our applications. Running a webserver out of a Windows service, with everything sandboxed and tuned to the needs of our application is much simpler.

Plus, no need to rely on Powershell scripts, or god forbid, the user, to get the correct set of IIS features installed has made deployment of our apps infinitely simpler.

Yep, agreed. If you are self-hosting as windows services make sure you check out http://topshelf-project.com/

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