Selfhosted

I have little experience with windows (web)servers and more with linux.

I have no idea why someone would want to set-up or manage a windows server. It's just pain if you previously did it with linux. Everything sucks. Where to find log messages, how to upgrade a php version and get that used by the webserver, backup, maintenance, how to write short and useful scripts for maintenance, the mixture of config files and lack thereof, and it needs double the resources.

I wouldn't do it in my spare time. I'd rather work on a way to get that OS in that VPS replaced... (My personal oppinion.)

In my experience, there’s a reason most things on the internet are not hosted on windows.

That said, you’ll want to look at IIS as a starting point.

Honestly, I think you’d be better served learning/understanding docker and just get that up and running in windows to host stuff instead. Managing windows hosting is a bizarre mix of hoping between quasi gui property windows and control panels.

Install docker for windows containers and play around and see what you can get running? I ran pretty much all the same containers as I do on linux when I was using windows server. 1GB of RAM is going to be the big limiting factor.

Even the very few things that I hosted that required Windows... I actually hosted through Wine just so I could skip running a windows server...

protip: if you have RDP open, you WILL get hacked.

With 1GB of RAM and windows you're likely not going to be able to do much, windows is a ridiculous resource hog

Many of the same applications you find hosted on *nix platforms can be used in Windows. I use Jekyll for example in website development. I feel that lack of activity with using Windows in selfhosted is mostly due to cost in licensing. The next hurdle for many is security. Being closed source Windows is inherently more difficult to validate for security. Not to say open source is more secure, just that the opportunity to evaluate is available.

I used to self host all of my services at the time (Jellyfin, Radarr, Sonarr, Jackett) on Windows before I built a dedicated server, and it worked surprisingly well. I basically just enabled WSL2, installed Ubuntu and pointed Docker Desktop at that, from there on it was pretty much just logging into Ubuntu and going about my business as usual. Don't recall any major issues during the 2+ years I had that setup going.

There are minor oddities and incompatibilities when it comes to networking (off the top of my head, host networking doesn't work iirc and the Docker host IP alias is different). The main thing is I'm not sure how easy that would be to setup in a remote SSH only environment or if it's even doable or allowed but it was quite simple to set up locally.

Pretty much the only thing I would host on Windows anymore are games servers. Lots of times there aren't native software alternatives for specific game servers and running through wine means a hit in performance.

I use Hyper-V on mine, and mostly run FreeBSD virtual machines + some Linux VMs. The actual Windows VMs I have are DNS controller, Exchange Server, and Remote Desktop. You are not going to be able to do any of those things on 1GB of RAM. My Exchange Server has 16GB RAM, DNS controller has 2GB, Remote Desktop has 32GB (could run on less depends what you want to do on it). There's 256GB of RAM in total on the computer.