IIS Administration Fundamentals

Course Overview
Hi everyone, my name is Jeremy Morgan, and welcome to my course, IIS Administration Fundamentals. I've been working with IIS servers for over a decade, managing servers in sizes ranging from small startups, to a Fortune 100 company. IIS Administration is a crucial skill to help you keep your website running well, and delivering awesome functionality. Learning good IIS administration can save you hours of troubleshooting and enable you to unlock awesome features for your website that your visitors will love. In this course we are going to learn some core fundamentals for administering IIS servers. Some of the major topics we will cover include installation and setup, authentication, SSL and TLS, and some administration topics that you need to know. By the end of this course you'll be able to confidently run your own IIS servers, tune their performance, and know what to do when things go wrong. Before beginning this course you should be familiar with general Windows administration, basic web concepts, and PowerShell. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn IIS administration with the IIS Administration Fundamentals course at Pluralsight.

Administering Our New IIS Website
The title of this module is Administering Our New IIS Website. We're going to take a look at some of the things you'll need to know when running and maintaining our Acme Widgets website. In this module we're going to cover some topics we'll need to know in order to administer the website efficiently. Now that we're getting our server set up, we'll need to configure some items to make sure it's ready to go live. We'll learn about modifying host headers, which is a crucial part of the initial setup, especially if you have multiple domains. Then we'll take a look at MIME types, which are extremely important in setup, and something that can cause you headaches later down the road. We'll talk about some compression options to help speed up your website. I'll cover default documents and some reasons you might want to change these. Finally, we'll examine and configure logging for our website, and look at some of the options available. What are host headers? Host headers allow you to host more than one website domain on the same IP address. When a visitor types www. acmewidgetcorp. com into their browser, that request is sent out to a Domain Name Server, or DNS, that turns the friendly name into an IP address. Then the request is routed to that IP address, which is the address of our IIS server. If an IIS server only hosts a single website, it's a simple process. Any requests that go to that IP address are shown the same web page. IIS listens on that IP address and serves up the default page. If you host more than one more domain on your web server, things become a bit trickier. When the request for each of those websites is sent, the DNS server sends them both to the same IP address. The web server must now decide which website to send acmewidgetcorp. com to, and which website to send csharpworkshop. com to. And it does this with host headers. The browser sends the host header in the request to the server, so IIS will extract that and direct the visitor to the correct website.