The service could not bind instance 1.

If you get an error like this:

The service could not bind instance 1. The data is the error code.
For additional information specific to this message please visit the Microsoft Online Support site

From W3SVC – then you may have experienced a problem that I ran into today (or something similar).

Basically, if your default web site cannot start, and you are receving this error – apparently it means that it cannot bind a socket to the port you have specified it to run on. So check that you have no applications or services running that are hogging this port (generally 80).
The application that was doing it to me, was Skype. To fix it, you can open skypes options/settings and click on the ‘connection’ section. You will notice that it says ‘use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections’ – if you uncheck this, save your settings (no need to restart anything) you should now be able to start your web site again.

Skype does this, so that if there’s a local firewall that’s doing some fancy port blocking, it knows that generally 80 will be open, so it opts to use that when all else fails – but can be very annoying in situations such as these, when you are running a web server on the same box!

Happy configuration!