SharePoint 2013 Service Cannot be Activated on host-named Site Collection

A host-named site collection on SharePoint has a URL format of apps.ozkary.com. In comparison, a path-based site collection has this URL ozkary.com/sites/apps.

When using a host-named site collection for document libraries, we may encounter some behavior that it is not reproducible when using a path-based site.  Let’s take a look at this service activation error.

Unable to activate service Error

Browser Error

This is error shown on the browser console.

https://apps.ozkary.com/_vti_bin/DocControl/DocControlService.svc/MoveFile 500 (System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException)

Server Error

This is the error shown on the server logs.

WebHost failed to process a request. System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException: The service '/_vti_bin/DocControl/DocControlService.svc' cannot be activated due to an exception during compilation.  The exception message is: The type 'DocControl.Controls.ISAPI.DocControl.DocControlService, DocControl.Controls, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=, provided as the Service attribute value in the ServiceHost directive, or provided in the configuration element system.serviceModel/serviceHostingEnvironment/serviceActivations could not be found

This error indicates that the service cannot be activated because it is not found.  This is a problem on the fact that the relative path the service activation is using is not found because our site is a host-named URL, and there is nothing defined on IIS for this path. A host-named URL is managed internally by SharePoint, so this is the reason why IIS may not have the URL defined on the site bindings.  A solution for this problem is to configure the site on IIS and add this URL to the site bindings.

After adding the binding, the operation that was causing the error should work properly.

I hope this helps.

Originally published by ozkary.com