windows-vps By the time a request reaches an ASP.NET worker process it has already consumed threads, memory, and possibly a database connection. IIS Request Filtering runs earlier in the pipeline and rejects malformed or hostile requests before the application pays for them. It is not a replacement for a WAF, but it removes an entire class … Read more
RDP has a long-standing security problem: when an administrator logs into a remote server using standard RDP, their cleartext-derived credentials are exposed in the remote session’s memory. Malware on a compromised server can harvest those credentials and pivot to every other machine that admin touches. Two Windows features were built specifically to close this gap … Read more
A two-node Windows Server Failover Cluster is achievable on VPS infrastructure, but the constraints are different from a datacenter build. Shared storage usually does not exist, quorum is a design decision rather than an afterthought, and network latency between nodes sets the practical ceiling for what can fail over cleanly. This is the design reference … Read more
Network faults on a Windows VPS usually show up as a single symptom — “the app can’t connect” — while the cause sits somewhere between DNS, the firewall, the listener, and the provider’s edge. Three tools cover most of that ground: Test-NetConnection for end-to-end reachability, Get-NetTCPConnection for local listener state, and netsh for the lower-level … Read more
IIS client certificate authentication — mutual TLS, or mTLS — lets you authenticate users and services with certificates instead of, or in front of, Windows credentials. It is the strongest access control IIS offers without a VPN, and it fails in three confusing ways: 403.16 when the server rejects the client certificate chain, 403.7 when … Read more
HTTP/2 is enabled by default on Windows Server 2016 and later, but HTTP/3 is not, and both need specific registry keys to behave correctly behind a proxy or load balancer. This guide covers enabling HTTP/3 over QUIC on IIS, verifying HTTP/2 is actually negotiating, and the TLS cipher suites that must be present for either … Read more
The first request to an ASP.NET application after an IIS restart is always the slowest. Application pool recycling, a server reboot, or a config change forces the worker process to recompile assemblies and warm caches, and that first user pays the entire cost — often five to thirty seconds of spinner. Application Initialization, built into … Read more
PowerShell transcription and Script Block Logging are the two audit controls that most Windows Server incidents are eventually reconstructed from. They do different jobs: transcript files record what appeared on the console and in the pipeline for a whole session, while event 4104 records the parsed script block itself, which is what you need when … Read more
Choosing the install option for Windows Server is one of the few decisions on a VPS that is expensive to reverse. The two options ship the same kernel, the same drivers, and the same servicing stack, but they present a very different footprint to the network and to whoever administers them. The trade-off is not … Read more
Printing from a Remote Desktop session on a Windows Server VPS is one of the most common support tickets in RDP environments — sessions show no printers, users see a generic “Microsoft Print to PDF” only, or the Redirection feature appears greyed out entirely. This guide explains how RDP printer redirection actually works (it does … Read more