HTTP Error 503, the service is unavailable

Question

I'm really new to setting up web servers in general. I've got IIS 8 on Windows 8, and I'm trying to set up a little site locally, while doing some development. In IIS I choose Add Site, give a name, points to a location where I have a index.html file (I've tried different locations, latest in a c:\inetpub\wwwroot\test -folder) and otherwise use all default settings. However, when I try to browse to localhost I get

HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.

I've verified the pool is started, and I've given IIS_IUSRS Full Control on the target folder

I've search around but not found anything that solved my issue, and there's nothing helpfull in the EventLog or in the C:\Windows\System32\LogFiles\HTTPERR folder

Could anyone tell me what's wrong?

Answer 1

I had the same error today. The issue was that I recently changed the domain password, so I had to update it in each Application Pool, in Advanced Settings > Process Model > Identity credentials.

Answer 2

Our server ran out of disk space on Sunday afternoon which led to an application suddenly failing and returning HTTP error 502. The logs were empty so it had to be something that was occurring before IIS even did anything.

A swift look at the event viewer(WIN+R > eventvwr) exposed the issue.

It's a good idea to filter out the output of the System and Application windows to WAS since it can get pretty verbose in there.

The application depended on another one which was disabled. Therefore keep in mind an application can go down indirectly if one of it's dependent processes has gone down. We simply re-enabled the .NET application pool and our other application started running normally again.

Answer 3

If App pool is running under some user identity then go to the advance settings of update username password again, it worked for me.

Answer 4

In my case, I created a new App Pool, and just forgot to start it.

Answer 5

Same thing with IIS Express 10.0 after upgrading Windows 7 to Windows 10. Solution: go to IIS and enable all disabled websites and reinstall ASP.NET Core.

Answer 6

After some try and error I found out, that the app pool was configured to use my domain account as identity and I remembered that I changed the password of my domain account shorty before. Resetting the application pool’s identity (using my new password) fixed the problem and the app pool could be restarted without any problems.