Most developers face a lot of problems while releasing a website in the production/hosting environment because they don't have experience with local IIS and custom domain names. IIS Express (localhost) provides developers with almost all the settings for development and debugging. Since most of the developers work with IIS Express, they have a lot of issues while working on the real server (hosting environment).

Instead of running, developing, and debugging (testing) a website using a localhost URL (like http://localhost:), local IIS (custom domain name) gives a good feel and looks professional. Setting a custom domain name instead of localhost will help you during website development, debugging, and its release.

Often, developers release security patches and updates to their customers. For this, they require the versioning of the domain. The virtual directory and application concept in IIS (Internet Information Services) helps developers to a version that I will also discuss in my article.

In this tutorial, I am going to explain various steps to change localhost to a custom domain name in IIS. This detailed article will cover the following topics as follows,

    Introduction
    Terminologies
    Prerequisites
    IIS Setup Configurations
    Changing localhost to Custom Domain Name Configurations
    Advanced Custom Domain Name Configurations
    Conclusion

Terminologies
As per Wikipedia, "Internet Information Services (IIS, formerly Internet Information Server) is an extensible web server software created by Microsoft for use with the Windows NT family. IIS supports HTTP, HTTP/2, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SMTP and NNTP".

Application Pool
An application pool defines a group of one or more worker processes, configured with common settings that serve requests to one or more applications that are assigned to that application pool. Since application pools allow a set of web apps to share one or more similarly configured worker processes, they provide an easy way to isolate a group of web applications from other web applications on the server machine.

With the help of application pools, we can achieve the level of application isolation required in terms of availability and security by deploying applications across multiple application pools. Each worker process is separated by process boundaries. Therefore, problems with applications in one application pool have no effect on sites or applications in other application pools. Application pools significantly increase the dependability and management of your web infrastructure.

Site
A site is a container for applications and virtual directories that can be accessed through one or more unique bindings. Binding has two major communication properties:

    Binding Protocol: It defines the protocol over which communication between the server and the client occurs. It can be either HTTP or HTTPS.
    Binding Information: It defines the information that is used to access the site. It is the combination of IP address, port, and optional host header.

If a site requires different protocols or binding information, it may have more than one binding.

Note
In earlier versions of IIS, only the HTTP and HTTPS protocols were supported, but in IIS 7 and above, bindings can apply to any protocol.

Application
An application is a set of files that delivers content or provides services over a protocol, such as HTTP. When you create an application in IIS, the path to the application becomes part of the URL of the site.

Virtual Directory
A virtual directory is a directory name (also called a path) that you specify in IIS and mapped to a physical/virtual directory on the system.

Note
Virtual Directories aren't supported with ASP.NET Core apps. An ASP.NET Core app can be hosted as an IIS sub-application.

In short, a site can contain more than one application or virtual directory, an application can contain more than one application or virtual directory, and a virtual directory can contain more than one application.

Prerequisites

    IIS (Internet Information Services)
    Running Project (Here, I am using an ASP.NET web application).
    Web Browser (Whatever you use, but I like Microsoft Edge)

IIS (Internet Information Services) Setup Configurations

This section will tell you how to set up IIS (Internet Information Services) in your system. First of all, we have to check whether our system has IIS enabled or not? For this open any of your favorite browsers and just type the following URL, "IIS Windows".

If you get this page, it means that you have already enabled IIS in your system. So, you can skip this section and go to the next section.

If you get this error, it means you need to enable it. So, stay with us and follow the steps given below very carefully. (Make sure you are connected to the Internet when configuring it).

Note
You can also check if you have IIS enabled on your system by searching for "IIS" in your Universal Search, which is next to the Start button.

Step 1
Click Start and type "Turn Windows features on or off" in the search bar. Then, click Turn Windows features on or off to open Windows Features.

Step 2
Search for "Internet Information Services" and check it and every box that appears in it needs to be checked. Click on the "OK" button to proceed.

Note
Make sure you have checked every box inside it. Because if some features are left, it will cause problems in IIS while mapping your application.

Step 3
After successful installation, a message will appear on the screen "Windows completed the requested changes". Now, click Close. (Now, you have to restart your system to apply all the changes).

After the system restarts, search for IIS again in your Universal Search Bar near the Start button. You will see the IIS as a result. Now, click on, to open it. (Alternatively, you can confirm it by typing the following URL, IIS Windows in any of your favorite browsers).

Congratulations, you have successfully enabled IIS in your system.

Changing Localhost to Custom Domain Name Configurations
Step 1
Click Start and type "IIS". Then click "Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager" to open the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.

Step 2
First, we create a new application pool to host our new application. Follow steps 2a and 2b very carefully to create a new application pool.

Step 2a
Right-click on the Application Pools, and click on "Add Application Pool...".

Step 2b
Now, create a new application pool by choosing the following configurations. (Note, if you are using the latest version of the .NET framework, select the following options).
    Give a name to your new application pool
    Select ".NET CLR Version v4.0.30319" option from .NET CLR Version
    Select the "Integrated" option from Managed pipeline mode

Step 3
Right-click on the Sites and select the "Add Website..." option from the list.

Step 4
Now, enter the details as per the given fields and your requirements. And, click the "OK" button.

    Site Name: Choose a name for your new website.
    Application pool: Select the "Application pool" that you have created earlier, by clicking on the "Select" option.
    Physical path: Select the main (root) directory of the application.
    Host name: Now, it's time to set up your custom domain name. In the "Host name" field, type the custom domain name you want for your application.

Note
If you do not select the Application Pool, a new application pool is created using the name of the site when the site is added. IIS defaults to one application pool per site.

Step 5It's time to register/map your custom domain name with your local IP (127.0.0.1). To do this, navigate to the following path, "C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc" and open the "hosts" file in any text editor with the Administrator privileges. Remember that, you will need administrator privileges to save your changes in the "hosts" file.

This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows. This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name. The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one space. Additionally, comments may be inserted on individual lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.

For example:

• 102.54.94.97     rhino.acme.com      # source server
• 38.25.63.10       x.acme.com           # x client host

Now, map your custom domain name as in the following example and save the file.

Congratulations, you have successfully changed localhost to the custom domain name for your application.

Now, we are going to fix the HTTP Error 503 on IIS. The service is unavailable in IIS 8 is caused if application pool is paused or disabled as shown within the image below:

Steps to resolve HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable are as follows:
1. First, Open your IIS and then go to Application Pool of the chosen web site. Here in this example the web site name is "test"
2. Choose the application Pool as shown within the picture below:

3. Click on the web site name within the Application Pool and so click on start as shown within the image below:

Browse the web site and the error would be resolved.

IIS has ever increasing amounts of security, you can’t publish a basic ASP.NET MVC website anymore and expect IIS 8 to host it without some additional work. The default config settings that the MVC uses are locked down in IIS, so it issues an error when you try to navigate to your fresh site.

Initially you may get a screen that says something bland and non-descriptive, like “Internal Server Error” with no further information. To get the more detailed error messages modify your web application’s web.config file and add the following line to the system.webServer section:

<httpErrors errorMode="Detailed" />

Now, you’ll get a more detailed error message. It will look something like this:

The key to the message is: This configuration section cannot be used at this path. This happens when the section is locked at a parent level. Locking is either by default (overrideModeDefault="Deny"), or set explicitly by a location tag with overrideMode="Deny" or the legacy allowOverride="false".

The “Config Source” section of the error message will highlight in red the part that is denied.

In order to allow the web.config to modify the the identified configuration element you need to find and modify the ApplicationHost.config file. It is located in C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config. You’ll need to be running as an Administrator level user in order to modify the file.

Find the section group the setting belongs to, e.g.

<sectionGroup name="system.webServer">

Then the section itself:

<section name="handlers" overrideModeDefault="Deny" />

And update overrideModeDefault to "Allow" in order to allow the web.config to override it.

When you refresh the page for the website the error will be gone (or replaced with an error for the next section that you are not permitted to override)

If you are reading this post you may face Http Error 500.19 error in your IIS 8.5. And in this article I’ll going to show you what I am doing to resolve this problem. I had simple webapi built by Visual Studio 2013, it work good when I run it from Visual Studio 13 but when I copy the project in IIS it give me this error.

Error Message

HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server Error The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid.

Detailed Error Information:

Module IIS Web Core
Notification BeginRequest
Handler Not yet determined
Error Code 0x80070021
Config Error This configuration section cannot be used at this path. This happens when the section is locked at a parent level. Locking is either by default (overrideModeDefault="Deny"), or set explicitly by a location tag with overrideMode="Deny" or the legacy allowOverride="false".
Config File \?\C:\inetpub\wwwroot\APITeslin\web.config

Config Source:

<system.webServer> 
  <handlers> 
    <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-Integrated-4.0" />

How to Solve HTTP Error 500.19 In IIS 8.5

1. Got to Server manager
2. Click Add roles and Features
3. In the roles section choose web server
   1. Under security sub-section choose everything (I excluded digest,  IP restrictions and URL authorization as we don't use them)
   2. Under Application Development choose .NET Extensibility 4.5, ASP>NET 4.5, both ISAPI entries
4. In the features section choose: NET 3.5, .NET 4.5, ASP.NET 4.5
5. In the web server section choose: Web Server (all), Management Tools (IIS Management Console and Management Service), Windows Authentication - if you are using any of it.

Those is step by step how to solve HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server Error IIS.

Today I noticed we were getting an expanding measure of spam on one of our sform pages. I was interested to check whether the majority of the client IP locations were the same (in which case I'd simply add them to the IIS IP Restrictions list). To rapidly and effortlessly make sense of this I chose to utilize LogParser.

Other than simply questioning for the page however, I needed to add an extra condition to prohibit lines that originated from a certain  internal IP address that we use for checking.

Here’s a generic version of the query I used:
LogParser.exe -q:on "SELECT * FROM x:\wwwlogs\W3SVC1\u_ex130411.log WHERE cs-uri-stem='/SomePage/' and c-ip<>'10.10.1.100' >c:\temp\PageVisitors.txt"

I needed to see the full logged information for the request, but if I didn’t, I could have very easily just pulled the IP addresses using:
LogParser.exe -q:on "SELECT c-ip FROM x:\wwwlogs\W3SVC1\u_ex130411.log WHERE cs-uri-stem='/SomePage/' and c-ip<>'10.10.1.100' >c:\temp\PageVisitors.txt"

You can see that I'm funneling the outcomes to a content record (the ">c:\temp\PageVisitors.txt" part) so I can without much of a stretch manage the outcomes. You might likewise need to observe that I'm utilizing the "-q:on" flag which runs the command in Quite Mode. In the event that you don't set this banner then LogParser will show comes about one page at once. At the point when funneling to a content record as opposed to the summon prompt window, you clearly can't hit a key for "next page" so without this banner the question will really hang forever if there is more than one page worth of results.

HostForLIFE.eu IIS 8.0 Hosting
HostForLIFE.eu is European Windows Hosting Provider which focuses on Windows Platform only. We deliver on-demand hosting solutions including Shared hosting, Reseller Hosting, Cloud Hosting, Dedicated Servers, and IT as a Service for companies of all sizes. We have customers from around the globe, spread across every continent. We serve the hosting needs of the business and professional, government and nonprofit, entertainment and personal use market segments.

At this article, I’m going to tell you how search out and replace any “_” (underscore) characters in a URL .htm file name and replace it with “-” (dash). The list I used to be given had file names with up to 7 underscores in any position in IIS 7.5. Example: my_file_name.htm

While I figured this might be a straight-forward task with IIS URL Rewrite, I used to be wrong. At the end I found that I either had to form one rule for every possible underscore count or write a custom rewrite rule. I went the one rule per count route. I scan in one journal you'll only spend to nine variables (). The other a part of the rule was they'd to be only in the “/articles/” directory.

My first challenge was simply to get regular expression in place. What I seen was that the IIS 7.5 UI’s “Test Pattern” utility doesn’t accurately test. Within the test this worked:
Input: http://www.webtest.com/articles/myfilename.htm
Pattern: ^.*\/articles\/(.*)_(.*).htm$
Capture Groups: {R:1} : "my", {R:2} : "test"

However, this doesn’t match in real-world testing. #1, don’t escape “/” (forward-slash). #2 the pattern is only matched against everything after the domain and first slash. So really, only this works:
Input: http://www.test.com/articles/myfilename.htm
Pattern: ^articles/(.*)_(.*).htm$
Capture Groups: {R:1} : "my", {R:2} : "test"

When  order to match against up to 8 underscores, you need 8 rules, each one looking for more underscores. So, Here is the code that I used:
Input: http://www.test.com/articles/myfilename.htm
Pattern: ^articles/(.*)_(.*)_(.*).htm$
Capture Groups: {R:1} : "my", {R:2} : "test", {R:3} : "file"

To do this with efficiency you only edit the web.config in the web root for that website. the end result concluded up being:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <rewrite>
            <rules>
                <rule name="AUSx1" stopProcessing="true">
                    <match url="^articles/(.*)_(.*).htm$" />
                    <action type="Redirect" url="articles/{R:1}-{R:2}.htm" />
                </rule>
                <rule name="AUSx2" stopProcessing="true">
                    <match url="^articles/(.*)_(.*)_(.*).htm$" />
                   <action type="Redirect" url="articles/{R:1}-{R:2}-{R:3}.htm" />
                </rule>
                <rule name="AUSx3" stopProcessing="true">
                    <match url="^articles/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*).htm$" />
                    <action type="Redirect" url="articles/{R:1}-{R:2}-{R:3}-{R:4}.htm" />
                </rule>
                <rule name="AUSx4" stopProcessing="true">
                    <match url="^articles/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*).htm$" />
                    <action type="Redirect" url="articles/{R:1}-{R:2}-{R:3}-{R:4}-{R:5}.htm" />
                </rule>
                <rule name="AUSx5" stopProcessing="true">
                    <match url="^articles/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*).htm$" />
                    <action type="Redirect" url="articles/{R:1}-{R:2}-{R:3}-{R:4}-{R:5}-{R:6}.htm" />
                </rule>
                <rule name="AUSx6" stopProcessing="true">
                    <match url="^articles/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*).htm$" />
                    <action type="Redirect" url="articles/{R:1}-{R:2}-{R:3}-{R:4}-{R:5}-{R:6}-{R:7}.htm" />
                </rule>
                <rule name="AUSx7" stopProcessing="true">
                    <match url="^articles/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*).htm$" />
                    <action type="Redirect" url="articles/{R:1}-{R:2}-{R:3}-{R:4}-{R:5}-{R:6}-{R:7}-{R:8}.htm" />
                </rule>
                <rule name="AUSx8" stopProcessing="true">
                    <match url="^articles/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*).htm$" />
                    <action type="Redirect" url="articles/{R:1}-{R:2}-{R:3}-{R:4}-{R:5}-{R:6}-{R:7}-{R:8}-{R:9}.htm" />
                </rule>
            </rules>
        </rewrite>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

In the end this URL:
http://www.yourdomain.com/articles/my_file_foo_bar.htm

Becomes:
http://www.yourdomain.com/articles/my-file-foo-bar.htm

By default it's available only in HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols Windows IIS though it supports others like TCP, PIPE protocols as well.

This blog demonstrates how to enable other protocols like TCP in IIS. Getting started, we know that Windows IIS by default supports only HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols and you will get those protocols in the binding window of IIS.

But other protocols like TCP, PIPE etc. Can be enabled by changing IIS feature, the below steps defines how to tune IIS features to enable TCP protocols.

Follow the Steps
     Open Control Panel=>Programs=>Click on Uninstall or Change a Program=> Click on Link ‘Turn Windows Features on or off’.

1. Windows Features window will be opened, expand .NET Framework Advance Service.

2. Expand WCF Services=>Select All the Features HTTPActivation, Message Queuing (MSMQ) Activation, Named Pipe Activation, TCPActivation, TCP Port Sharing .Click OK button.
   

Now you are done, if you follow the above steps correctly, you will get the mentioned protocols in the binding window.

Today, I will write about PUT, POST and DELETE verbs on the web application in IIS. And this is the error:

<h2>405 - HTTP verb used to access this page is not allowed.</h2>
<h3>The page you are looking for cannot be displayed because an invalid method (HTTP verb) was used to attempt access

After some troubleshooting the error was isolated to the actual fact that WebDav was put in on the server and was intercepting those requests for its own service use.
Rather than removing WebDav from the server, we tend to went searching for another answer. thankfully somebody on Twitter understood the problem and gave an example of changes to create to the client’s web.config get in order to disable (remove) the WebDav module for simply that specific website while not requiring any manual body actions on the server.

The code updates to create to your web.config file to resolve this error are:
<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <handlers>
      <remove name="WebDAV" />
      <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_32bit" />
      <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_64bit" />
      <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-Integrated-4.0" />
      <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_32bit" path="*." verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS" modules="IsapiModule" scriptProcessor="%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_isapi.dll" preCondition="classicMode,runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness32" responseBufferLimit="0" />
      <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_64bit" path="*." verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS" modules="IsapiModule" scriptProcessor="%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\aspnet_isapi.dll" preCondition="classicMode,runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness64" responseBufferLimit="0" />
      <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-Integrated-4.0" path="*." verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS" type="System.Web.Handlers.TransferRequestHandler" preCondition="integratedMode,runtimeVersionv4.0" />
    </handlers>
    <modules>
      <remove name="WebDAVModule" />
    </modules>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

I hope this tutorial works for you!

HostForLIFE.eu IIS 8.0 Hosting
HostForLIFE.eu is European Windows Hosting Provider which focuses on Windows Platform only. We deliver on-demand hosting solutions including Shared hosting, Reseller Hosting, Cloud Hosting, Dedicated Servers, and IT as a Service for companies of all sizes. We have customers from around the globe, spread across every continent. We serve the hosting needs of the business and professional, government and nonprofit, entertainment and personal use market segments.

I wanted to test Windows 7, a website with Windows Authentication.

Normally it is sufficient, Windows Authentication in "Programs and Features" / "Windows Features" to activate



and then in the IIS Manager to enable:



When you call the page, however, to my astonishment, I received a popup to enter the user data:



After I entered the credentials three times, I received the following error:



The reason for this is that I've given the site its own host header.

Produces the result that the loopback check, which was introduced with Windows XP SP2 (and apparently also in Windows 7 is used), fails, and the above error message with the Error Code 0xc000006d.

The behavior and the remedy is in KB896861 described.

Windows Server 2012 R2 comes with IIS 8.5, and in this release an issue has been found in relation to the Dynamic Compression module.  The module sets the “Vary” header which is used to specify caching properties that the browser uses to determine whether the response should be cached or not. 

In IIS 8.0 and earlier, the Dynamic Compression module was overwriting the Vary header with the value “Accept-Encoding”, and as it happens this is the correct value to ensure that dynamic content is correctly cached – but – according to IIS it should be appending this value to the existing value and not overwriting it.

As it happens, this was supposed to be fixed in IIS 8.5 but the fix appears to be broken.  In IIS 8.5 (which ships with Windows Server 2012 R2) the Vary header is being set to “*” and the “Accept-Encoding” from the Dynamic Compression module is not appended.  The result of this is that no dynamic content is being cached by the browser.

Workaround

Thankfully there is an easy workaround in IIS 8.5 for this:

1. Select an IIS site, and go to Configuration Editor

2. Select system.web/caching/outputCache section, then set the omitVaryStar property to true

Setting this value results in the Vary header being returned with a value of “Accept-Encoding” and the browser then caches the dynamic content.