Securing your Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS) with HTTPS and SSL

With the rapid increase in identity theft and various forms of cybercrime, security your website with Secure Socket Layer, or SSL for short has become more important and more common. If you are hosting your web site on Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS), you might be looking into setting it to use HTTPS, and in this guide, we will see how to do so.

 The first step for this seems to be getting a digital certificate…right? Well, not necessarily. The first step is actually deciding whether you want to have your own custom domain, or to run your site using Azure’s default domain of Azurewebsites.net. The reason for this being the 1st step is that Windows Azure Web Sites actually comes pre-configured to run on SSL, and if you don’t want your own domain, then you can use SSL immediately. All you have to do is simply browse to it! In your browser, change the prefix from https:// to HTTPS:// and voila! Your site will respond and you will have a secure connection to it.
However, we do not recommend using this to secure sensitive content or applications, because the wildcard certificate used is generic for all Azure Web Sites.

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