I recently moved away from shared hosting, and went to a virtual private server in order to scale a site out better. Unfortunately, this meant that I needed to take on more administration of the server to do things that are done for me in a shared hosting environment. One feature that I have come to rely on is one click publishing from VS.NET 2010. In order to make this work, you need to have WebDeploy set up properly.

I found the steps from this page to be very helpful. Another good guide can be found here.

Be careful if you install Web Deploy via the Web Platform Installer. For some reason, when I did this, the Management Service Delegation feature was not installed. I ended up uninstalling and then installing straight from the official site, and the feature was available.

I initially had some settings wrong, and was getting back HTTP 401 and 550 errors. The log files didn't provide much help, but you can add tracing to help diagnose the cause of most issues.