A comprehensive guide to Windows VPS usage, from beginner to advanced levels, covering practical tutorials on server configuration, software installation, security hardening, and performance optimization. Ideal for newcomers to get started quickly, while also serving as a technical reference for advanced users.
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
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
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
Every IIS application pool recycles itself on a schedule — by default every 1,740 minutes (29 hours) — but the default is rarely the right answer for your workload. Recycling is IIS’s way of releasing leaked memory, closing stale connections, and clearing corrupted state, and it happens far more often than most administrators realize. This … Read more
Windows Server ships with a full performance-monitoring stack — Performance Monitor (PerfMon), Data Collector Sets, and the Get-Counter PowerShell cmdlet — that covers 95% of what a small team needs without buying an agent. The problem is rarely tooling; it is knowing which of the hundreds of counters actually predict trouble. This article lists the … Read more
Patch Predictably or Patch in an Emergency An unpatched Windows Server is a liability; an auto-rebooting one is an outage. The fix is a maintenance window: a defined time slot when updates install, a defined reboot policy, and a way to verify the server comes back clean. This guide covers the three mechanisms that make … Read more
DNS is the foundation of an Active Directory domain: every logon, LDAP bind, Kerberos ticket request, Group Policy refresh, and SYSVOL lookup begins with an SRV or host (A) record query. When a DC’s DNS goes bad, users do not see “DNS error” — they see logon failures, GPO processing taking 20 minutes, and printers … Read more
RDP is the most attacked service on a Windows VPS. Expose port 3389 to the internet and automated scanners start guessing passwords within minutes; leave it wide open and a dictionary attack will eventually find a weak credential. The genuinely hard part of securing RDP is not knowing which settings to apply — it is … Read more