windows-vps DHCP is one of those roles that everyone uses and few people configure deliberately. A default installation hands out addresses, but it also hands out your old DNS server, the wrong gateway, and a lease time that starves your subnet of free IPs. On a Windows server instance used as an internal network service, a … Read more
On a Remote Desktop Session Host, roaming profiles and folder redirection were the traditional answer to “users must see the same desktop on every host.” Both are slow, both corrupt state on logoff, and both struggle with applications that write to AppData. FSLogix replaces them with a container approach: each user’s entire profile lives in … Read more
Storage Spaces is Microsoft’s software-defined storage layer, built into Windows Server, and it is the first thing many administrators reach for when a VPS needs a redundant disk pool. The obvious question — how does it compare to hardware or firmware RAID — has a genuinely practical answer on a virtual machine, and it is … Read more
Windows Server licensing on a VPS confuses administrators because two different models collide. Retail and volume licensing prices Windows Server by the physical core, and that is the model most guides describe. SPLA — the Services Provider License Agreement — is the model hosting providers actually use, and it prices by the month, per user … Read more
Remote Desktop Session Shadowing lets an administrator view or take control of another user’s active RDP session without interrupting it. On Windows Server it is both a support tool and an audit control: with session recording and the right event logging, you get a defensible record of who accessed which session and when. This article … Read more
Compression is one of the cheapest performance wins on an IIS-hosted site, and it is also one of the most commonly left on the default. Windows Server ships IIS with static and dynamic compression modules that support gzip out of the box, while Brotli only arrives through cross-platform .NET hosting or third-party modules. Choosing between … Read more
DNS is the most hit service on any internal Windows network and the easiest to leave at defaults. A resolver answering in 40 ms instead of 4 ms multiplies across every login, every API call that resolves a hostname, and every site-to-site lookup. On a single Windows VPS the DNS Server role is often installed … Read more
Two built-in Windows features restrict what software may run: AppLocker and Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC, formerly Device Guard Code Integrity). They overlap enough that teams pick the wrong one and then fight it. AppLocker is policy-through-Group-Policy and readable by anyone who understands file paths and publishers. WDAC is kernel-enforced code integrity with a signed … Read more
A single IIS server eventually hits a ceiling. The two ways past it are scale up (a larger VPS) or scale out (several nodes behind a load balancer). On Windows Server the native scale-out answer is an IIS Web Farm fronted by Application Request Routing (ARR) with URL Rewrite. This walkthrough stands up a two-node … Read more
“HTTP Error 500.30 – ANCM In-Process Start Failure.” “HTTP Error 502.5 – Process Failure.” If you host .NET or ASP.NET Core apps on IIS, you have seen one of these and spent an hour guessing. The good news: IIS has a built-in diagnostic that tells you exactly what happened during startup — Failed Request Tracing … Read more