How to bounce (restart) IIS

When I first started using IIS, the only way that I knew how to restart it was going to the services control panel, finding the IIS admin service and restarting it that way. That method was annoying on a number of levels, one of which is that for whatever reason, it takes for ever. That might be because it also restarts the ftp and smtp services if you have those running.

There are two other methods that I use on a regular basis.

1) From the command line. Just open a cmd window and type in IISreset (and like normal, that’s not case sensitive. Doing it that way takes a noticably shorter amount of time than from the command line. You can also do IISreset /stop or IISreset /start. I use that if there is something I’m doing that I need IIS off for.

2) From the IIS management snap in. Anyone who works with IIS a lot will probably already be familiar with this tool, but a lot of people don’t realize that you can also use it to restart IIS. When can find a shortcut to the Internet Information Services Management snap-in in the administrator tools folder. In the tree view on the left, the top node is called Internet Information Services. Right under that should be the node representing your local computer (or whatever computer you have connected to). Right click on that, go to All Tasks, and then click on Reset IIS. It’s that easy!