Internet Information Services (IIS) is a web server software developed by Microsoft Corporation, seamlessly compatible with Windows operating systems. As a feature of Windows, IIS can be conveniently added or removed. It is the preferred web server for hosting .NET applications. Here are some common IIS operations for quick reference by system administrators of Windows cloud servers:

1.Installing IIS is quite straightforward – it simply needs to be enabled in Windows. Navigate to Control Panel => Turn Windows features on or off => Server Roles, check the box for Web Server (IIS), and then click install.

2.Hosting multiple websites with IIS is also easy. Let's start by creating the first website! Open Control Panel => System and Security => Administrative Tools => IIS Manager. Expand the left-side menu sequentially, click on "Sites" to list all websites hosted in IIS. Click “Add Website” in the right-side menu and fill in details like site name, application pool, physical path, and hostname.

3.The site name can be freely chosen and modified. The application pool can be adjusted anytime. The physical path refers to the directory where the site is stored; each site on the server should have its own unique directory. The hostname is usually the domain name of the site, such as example.com.

4.To start or stop a website, simply click on the desired site, then in the right-side menu, click “Start,” “Stop,” or “Restart.”

5.For restricted site access, set up authentication. The common method is HTTP authentication, specifically Basic Authentication. Double-click on the relevant site, click “Authentication,” and then enable the desired type of authentication. When Basic Authentication is enabled, only operating system users can access the site, or those granted access via Active Directory. The default IIS authentication is Anonymous Authentication, which requires specifying a particular user of the operating system or an application pool identity as the anonymous user identity.

6.Enabling compression can increase site access speed. Double-click on the relevant site, click “Compression,” and then select either Enable dynamic content compression or Enable static content compression.

7.Pseudo-static rules for IIS sites are stored in the web.config file, unlike Apache, which uses the .htaccess file. After installing the “URL Rewrite” module, .htaccess rules can be imported into “URL Rewrite,” and IIS will automatically convert them to the web.config file format.

8.The first step in enabling SSL for a site is to purchase an SSL certificate from a third party. Click on the root directory in the left IIS menu, usually the server name, then click “Server Certificates” in the middle panel and “Import” in the right-side menu to import the SSL certificate. Next, click on the relevant site, click “Bindings” in the right-side menu, add a binding of type https, and select the recently added SSL certificate. Finally, test in a browser to ensure the https protocol is accessible.