Launch Your Own Website in 15 Minutes Using IIS

Selva Ganapathy
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Article

Introduction

Of course many humans are passionate to launch their own website as needed. To meet this, Microsoft IIS provides one way to launch a website. Here is a tour of the basic IIS operations that help to launch their own website in their Local Host. May be many resources are available on the internet to study about IIS, but I hope this article is for the very beginner level and for those trying to test their web application in their local machine so it may be one of the quiet and interesting among them and will enjoy a great play with Microsoft IIS.

IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) is an extensible web server created by Microsoft for use with the Windows NT family. IIS supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SMTP and NNTP. It has been an integral part of the Windows NT family since Windows NT 4.0, though it may be absent from some editions. IIS is not installed on by default when Windows is installed. The IIS Manager is accessed using the Microsoft Management Console or Administrative Tools in the Control Panel.

Basic Preparations / Configurations

Before asscesing IIS on your machine please ensure the machine's Firewall is off to avoid restrictions on the launching of your site. To turn off the Firewall please use the following procedure.

Open “Customize Window” Windows from Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Windows Firewall\Customize Settings.
Click Turn off Windows Firewall.

How to Reach IIS in Windows 8.1 Machine

To open IIS Manager, just search on your Windows Machine using the Keyword “IIS”. It filters Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager and does a mouse click on it to open the IIS.

IIS Window

Launch a Web Site

By default IIS provides a default named “Default Web Site” to launch your site. You can use this or else create a new one.

To create a new website right-click on “Sites” and click on the “Add Website…” menu to open a dialog.

Fill in the necessary details in the dialog as required like SiteName (it will not affect your domain name, it's just the name of your site's name and will not be reflected in your web address), physical path, port (80 as default) and host name (not mandatory). Also check "Start website immediately" to ready to publish.

Now your new website is added under your IIS Sites.

Create a simple web application to launch (for example, in HTML) using the following code in Notepad and save it as “test.html” in any location on the physical path, for example F:\MyWebsiteProgram. Now the web application is ready.

<html>
<body>
Hello World! I am Tamilan!!
</body>
</html>

Then open your browser and type your web address with port and path of the web application. For example here it is: http://www.kathiresan.com:8099/test.html.

Also you can use it and follow the same procedure in the Default Web Site or else you can use inetpub to launch the web application. In other words, you can simply move your application folder in “C:\inetpub\wwwroot” and it will be added under your Default Web Site as in the following, if this is not present then just right-click on Default Web Site and click the Refresh menu.