SSMS: Limit a login to be able to view and work only with some databases, but not able to make any changes on the server level On a shared cloud we would like to work with one instance of MS SQL Server. Different clients have various databases. They can be owner of their databases and with DENY VIEW ANY DATABASE TO PUBLIC in SSMS they can only see their databases. That works fine. To connect to SSMS they need the CONTROL SERVER permission. But even after a DENY of all the server level permissions they are able to do many things in SSMS, like restart the sql server services. Of course this should not be possible for such users. 
How can a user be configured not to be able to do any actions to the server itself?
To connect to SSMS they need the CONTROL SERVER permission.


No, that is not true at all. I hope you didn't learn that from any documentation, blog post or presentation. If you did, you should tell us where, so we can hunt them down and correct it.

In order to connect, they need to be a member of the public role (granted by default to all logins). To do anything aside from connect, they need to be granted explicit permissions or added to server-level roles. To connect to a database, they need CONNECT. To do anything aside from connect to a database, they need to be granted explicit permissions or added to database roles.

If you don't want them to have the permissions inherited from CONTROL SERVER, then don't grant that permission. Simple.

And don't test what an end user can do at the service level by connecting to the server in your copy of Management Studio using their credentials. The ability to perform certain operations (like restarting the service) has nothing to do with accounts or permissions inside SQL Server - your Windows domain account is checked, regardless of what user is connected in Object Explorer. To verify this, go to someone's workstation who doesn't have the ability - via their Windows account - to restart services at the Windows level, and try again. Or create a guest account on your own machine.