Start or Stop the Web Server (IIS 7)
Applies To: Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista
You can stop IIS when you want to stop the Web server from serving content, such as when you upgrade applications. To stop the Web server, you must stop the Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) and the World Wide Web Publishing Service (W3SVC). You can then start the Web server when you are ready for the Web server to serve content again.
When you stop WAS and W3SVC, all sessions connected to your Web server are dropped. Any in-memory session state is lost. All sites are unavailable until these services are restarted. Therefore, you should avoid stopping and restarting your Web server if you can.
Note
You must be a server administrator to perform this procedure.
To start or stop a Web server
You can perform this procedure using the user interface (UI) or a command line. For information about opening IIS Manager, see Open IIS Manager (IIS 7).
Using the UI
Open IIS Manager and navigate to the Web server node in the tree.
In the Actions pane, click Start if you want to start the Web server or Stop if you want to stop the Web server.
Using a command line
Open an elevated command-line window.
At the command prompt, type net stop WAS and press ENTER; type Y and then press ENTER to also stop W3SVC.
To restart the Web server, type net start W3SVC and press ENTER to start both WAS and W3SVC.