The Complete Course of IIS Web Server

Explore system requirements and prerequisites for installing IIS, including Windows features, admin access, updates, and two installation methods (Windows built-in and Windows Server via VirtualBox).

Install IIS via the control panel by enabling the management console and world wide web services. Then apply changes and restart the server to complete the setup.

Navigate the IIS GUI to manage sites, application pools, and authentication, and configure default documents, HTTP handler mappings, response headers, logging, and modules to secure and optimize web hosting.

Learn to create an IIS application pool, select the dotnet version, and choose start options. Then associate web applications to the pool and understand isolation, security, and basic pooling concepts.

Create and host a simple HTML site in IIS by adding a new website and configuring its physical path, bindings, ports, and deployment.

Learn how to configure bindings in IIS by pairing IP address, port, and host header to serve websites, including adding bindings, using http/https, and hosting multiple sites on one IP.

Understand how virtual directories in IIS map a physical folder to a URL path, exposing content beyond the root with independent settings and straightforward steps to add and test them.

Explore how IIS application pools isolate websites into separate work processes for reliability, management, and performance, with demos on creation and recycling.

Deploy a html css javascript site to IIS by placing files in the default directory and creating a site with an application pool. Bind by IP, port, and host name.

Explore the difference between authentication and authorization, and learn how to configure and test basic, digest, anonymous, and Windows authentication on an IIS web server through practical demos.

Explore the authentication providers in IIS server, including Kerberos, ALM, and negotiate-based methods, with configuration of extended protection, kernel mode authentication, and providers list.

Discover how authorization works in IIS: authenticate users, apply role- and group-based rules, and create allow and deny policies at the URL level to protect resources.

Explain the ssl certificate basics, its architecture, and the ssl vs tls differences. Demonstrate creating and applying a certificate on an IIS host, including self-signed and domain certificates.

Explore IIS performance optimization through content caching, compression, and load balancing for high availability and scalable web server performance. Tune http headers and application pool settings to boost efficiency.

Learn how caching static and dynamic content in IIS improves performance by serving from browser, memory, or kernel caches, and configure output caching and caching rules.

Apply bandwidth throttling in IIS by setting per-site limits on bytes per second. Limit connections and set timeouts, then save the settings across each website to distribute bandwidth resources.

Learn how load balancing distributes traffic across multiple servers to boost performance and availability, and explore vertical and horizontal scalability to handle increasing workloads with resilient architecture.

Configure and analyze IIS server logs for troubleshooting and performance monitoring. Learn to enable access, error, security, and application logs, set formats and rollover, and perform log analysis.

Learn to monitor an IIS web server with Windows performance monitor, select the server, add counters for processor and memory, and interpret real-time graphs and reports.

Learn to use Windows event viewer to monitor IIS server events, view and filter logs by level (critical, error, warning, information), customize views, and export XML reports.

Explore high availability concepts in IIS, including load balancing, clustering, failover, replication, and disaster recovery, with a focus on redundancy, health checks, and automatic failover.

Configure load balancing and clustering in IIS to achieve high availability and disaster recovery by creating server farms, adding multiple servers, and applying routing and failover configurations.

Understand disaster recovery as part of security planning to recover from catastrophic events and minimize downtime with backups, failover, and data center redundancy in IIS environments.

Explore high availability best practices for web servers, focusing on redundancy, data backup and recovery, load balancing, and automatic failover to minimize downtime.

Learn to harden IIS web server against common vulnerabilities using request filtering and IP and domain restrictions. Apply secure server and application configurations with regular patching to maintain security.

Learn how system hardening reduces attack surface across application, operating system, server, database, and network layers by removing default passwords, hardcoded credentials, and unpatched software.

Harden the IIS server by applying advanced configurations beyond defaults, including authentication and authorization, application pool identity settings, ssl configurations, logging, cookies, and patch management via Windows updates.

Reflect on the journey through the complete IIS web server course, covering ssl certificate implementation, deploying apps, monitoring and logging, high availability, performance optimization, and security hardening.