IIS 7.5 Help - Showing wrong sites (Not using physical path)

[macmilm]

Bit of a strange one.
Default web site - works fine Setup another web site (any) - Physical path as "C:\hostingspaces\admin\domain.co.uk\wwwroot\"
When you try and browse the site it displays the iis 7.5 welcome screen e.g. iisstart.htm instead of the site at the specified dir
At first I thought it was displaying the default web site welcome page but I have changed this to eliminate it and it is not doing that
The only other location with iisstart.htm is: "c:\windows\winsxs\amd64_microsoft-windows-iis-corewebengine_31bf3856......."
Why would this be happening.
Also I currently have two web servers on the go as I am going to be migrating sites to this one so I compared bindings, paths, and everything else I could think of in IIS between the two servers to make sure they are the same... as the sites on the old server work fine,and this still happens.

Running 2008 Server Standard x64 and IIS 7.5 Thanks for any tips

[Mr.James]

Sounds like the host headers are set up in dns but not set up for the website... Can't remember where they're configured in the iis management console but that's the first thing i'd check...

[macmilm]

Sounds like the host headers are set up in dns but not set up for the website... Can't remember where they're configured in the iis management console but that's the first thing i'd check...

I should have said, this is when browsing the sites on the actual web server, server not gone live yet so not tried remotely....
Could headers still be the issue??? I assume as its local its not using DNS anyway is it ??

Thanks Mr James...

[reverend]

If you're not specifying host headers then it will just serve the default web site on port 80 - one way we used to test this locally was to add the entries to the local hosts file of the server, that way you could always test the local server from itself - alternatively just add entries to your local hosts file on your client pointing directly to the server and remove those when complete

It will still be trying to use DNS even locally, and that's where the hosts override comes in (as long as it's not explicitly disabled).

[Mr.James]

The headers are how it knows which website to display. When your browser requests a web page, it sends the URL to the web server (eg www.test-site.com). The web server then checks each site to see if the url matches the host header of the sites it has. If it does it displays the page that matches... If not, then the default site acts as a catch all and it displays that...

I'm thinking that the host headers aren't matching so it's sending back the default site...

Either way you must use host headers for it to be able to distinguish a different site. As a test set a dummy host header on the default site and the name of the server as a host header on the website you want to test. This should then take you into the testing website when you browse to http://servername

[macmilm]

When I add the website in IIS I add the hostname in the Hostname field in the binding section.. I thought that automatically added it as a host header.
This is exactly how I did it on my old VPS which is still working fine thats what I cant figure it out :-(
Gonna double check everything

P.S
I also tried using WebSitePanel which auto does all this for you and still had same problem.

I am more of a developer so might be saying some stupid stuff, just trying to save costs by running my own VPS which had worked fine for 2 years untill now when I am trying to move over to a Cloud VPS.

Thanks for all your help guys.

[Mr.James]

Sounds like you've got it configured properly... It's not something silly like iis needing a restart?