windows-vps A Windows VPS runs unattended, which means maintenance either happens automatically or it does not happen at all. Task Scheduler is the built-in tool that makes recurring jobs reliable: nightly temp-file cleanup, log rotation, database backups, and scheduled reboots all run as scheduled tasks without anyone logging in. This guide covers creating tasks three ways … Read more
Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is the most targeted service on any public-facing Windows server. Botnets continuously scan the internet for port 3389, and ransomware operators routinely buy stolen RDP credentials or brute-force their way in. The good news is that Windows Server ships with the tools to stop almost all of these attacks. This article … Read more
Both IIS and Nginx run on Windows Server, so the “which one” question is decided by your workload, not by the operating system. The short version: if your application is .NET or needs Windows Authentication, use IIS. If you are serving static files, proxying Node.js or PHP, or handling high concurrency with limited memory, Nginx … Read more
Understand the five PowerShell execution policies, build an internal code-signing certificate in 2026, and enforce AllSigned on production servers without breaking scheduled tasks.
FTP-based deployments are fragile. A dropped connection mid-upload, a missing web.config, or mismatched file permissions can take a site offline for minutes. Microsoft Web Deploy (MSDeploy) solves this by using a sync engine that understands IIS structure: it uploads only changed files, applies web.config transformations, and can take the application offline during the swap. This … Read more
RDP gives you an interactive desktop; WinRM gives you an API surface. They are not competitors so much as different layers of the same server. Interactive fixes belong in Remote Desktop. Anything you will run more than once — patching, user provisioning, log harvesting, configuration drift checks — belongs in a scripted, auditable channel. This … Read more
A Windows Server that runs out of disk does not fail gracefully. Services stop, the event log stops writing, Windows Update fails with error 0x80070070, and backup jobs die quietly half-way through a VSS snapshot. On a VPS the root volume is usually 60–120 GB, so the usual Windows growth patterns — WinSxS from cumulative … Read more
Expose a Windows Server’s RDP port to the internet and you will see brute-force attempts within minutes — typically 5,000 to 20,000 failed logins per day on a plain 3389 endpoint. The good news: three settings neutralize the overwhelming majority of those attacks, and all three are built into Windows Server with no third-party software. … Read more
Patch management is the most tedious part of running Windows Server, and the tooling decision gets made wrong more often than any other. The three mainstream options — plain Windows Update, WSUS, and Azure Update Manager — overlap heavily, which is exactly why teams end up with a WSUS server nobody maintains or a fleet … Read more
Putting HTTPS on IIS is a three-part job: a certificate, a site binding that uses it, and a redirect that pushes HTTP traffic to the secure endpoint. Each step has its own pitfalls — a certificate name mismatch, a missing private key, or a redirect loop can waste an afternoon. This guide walks through bindings, … Read more