We will work with ahwrite in this post. You should always use an instance of AdminManager to read the config which always give you effective config for a config path. WritableAdminManager might give wrong values which can vary depending on value of CommitPath. If you are not planning to write to IIS config files, you can just replace ahwrite with ahread in the samples. CommitChanges(), CommitPath get/set calls need ahwrite. Lets read system.webServer/urlCompression doStaticCompression, doDynamicCompression property values for server root using IAppHostAdminManager. You do this by getting IAppHostElement instance corresponding to urlCompression section using GetAdminSection. GetAdminSection take two parameters. First parameter is the section name and second parameter is config path. MACHINE/WEBROOT/APPHOST is the path corresponding to server root. This can be changed to MACHINE/WEBROOT/APPHOST/<SITENAME>/<APPNAME>/<VDIR>/<FOLDER>/<FILENAME>.