Today we run into an issue where there was a need to start the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application Service on our Application Servers.
After starting the service and checking IIS and seeing that the app pools were getting created, thought everything was fine but later that day still no IIS Sites showed up so when checking the services, the status was “ Starting” instead of “ Started”
The issues was fixed by using the “old” STSADM command
Open a command and make sure you do that with the right permissions (Run as Admin)
Navigate to the STSADM directory which can be found via: (SP 2013)
cd \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\BIN
When in that directory, use stsadm -o provisionservice -action start -servicetype spwebservice
Wait some time (can take long) but in the end your service will be started
