Get Started with Microsoft Azure Web Sites (MAWS)

This is my first blog post and I am hoping to write a series of posts on Azure Web Sites. This blog post will provide some useful quick links to get started with Microsoft Azure Web Sites (MAWS). 

 

Microsoft Azure Web Sites (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/websites/) provides you with wonderful and easier means to host your content online across many platforms. The ease of scaling up the website based on the traffic/load, the various deployment options of the source code and piece of mind to not worry about the frequent updates to the different platforms/security patches are some of the highlights.

 

You can get started with a free trial for a month by signing using live account at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/.

 

Once the new account is setup, you can access the portal at https://manage.windowsazure.com. There is also a new portal under construction which provides a different look at https://portal.azure.com.

 

Create your simple website easily by following the article https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-create-deploy/. By default, the domain of the users looks like *.azurewebsites.net. The users can change to custom domain as discussed in the article  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-custom-domain-name/. Once the custom domain is setup correctly, you can also verify the DNS lookup using https://www.digwebinterface.com/.

 

Based on the storage and compute need, there are various website pricing offers (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/websites/) for you to scale the sites and there is also auto-scaling option if needed. 

 

The status of the azure websites and for updates on any issues can be checked at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/.

 

All the features of the Azure Website has been discussed in various articles in the Azure blog site https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/.

 

For any issues\clarifications with the websites, you can contact Azure Websites forum https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/azure/en-US/home?forum=windowsazurewebsitespreview for inputs. Also, for any feedback on the features, you can write at https://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-sites.