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I may be completely misunderstanding what Azure is but is it possible for me to host a basic website on Windows Azure?

I have a site that I've built in HTML and CSS that I'd like to upload to Azure but I can't figure out any way to do this. The site claims I can use it for web hosting, but if I can't FTP then I'm not sure how to do this. Is there a simple tutorial somewhere?

I couldn't find anything close to what I'm looking for through searching.

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    I don't understand how a site that you have built could claim something? Does it have his own life? Anyway you are on the wrong path, there are millions of webhosting service based on Linux/cPanel, search on Google "webhosting cPanel" any of them are able to host your webiste for few bucks. – Marco Demaio Jan 25 '13 at 22:27
  • @MarcoDemaio - I think he meant "The Azure Website claims I can use it for web hosting" and not his personal site. Windows Azure is a cloud infrastructure. See here: stackoverflow.com/questions/6774920/ftp-access-on-windows-azure – ionFish Jan 27 '13 at 17:16
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    @ionFish: still there are millions of webhsoting offering cloud on Linux, IMHO going Windows on server/webhosting is total nonsense and a waste of time. – Marco Demaio Jan 30 '13 at 16:05
  • I mostly just want to see how it works, I'm currently hosting my site somewhere else. – JacobTheDev Feb 19 '13 at 14:07
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You should take a look at Windows Azure Web Sites. Web Sites offers a very straightforward way to deploy your apps to Azure without worrying about any virtual machine setup. It also has a free tier, which you can then upgrade when you feel you need more capacity, want to add SSL, or add a custom domain name.

Web Sites offers ftp access, but also has full source control integration, letting you choose between TFS, github, local git, dropbox, BitBucket, and CodePlex:

enter image description here Keep in mind: With Azure, you have:

  • Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), where you control everything on your virtual machines, including maintenance on the OS (whether Linux or Windows)
  • Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), where you have access to the full virtual machine and can make changes at will (via startup scripts), but you're relieved of OS maintenance
  • Web Sites (which I sometimes call PaaS+ ), which provides an IIS web farm, run in Azure itself, providing continuous integration (via several source control providers), autoscale, monitoring, etc.

Web Sites also lets you spin up pre-installed software by simply selecting one from the gallery. You can, of course, select just a plain Windows Server, but you can also select CMS's (WordPress, DNN), wiki's (mediawiki), bbs's (phpBB) and others. I just grabbed this screenshot, showing a few of the gallery selections:

enter image description here

There are, of course, times when you need to shift to PaaS or IaaS. However: Web Sites offers a significant amount of functionality, and I believe this best suits what you're asking for.

One more thing: In case you're curious about the differences between Web Sites and PaaS (which have virtual machine templates called Web Roles and Worker Roles), take a look at this answer I posted to StackOverflow comparing the two.

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Better choose any shared or dedicated web hosting plans, use GoDaddy or BigRock or someother hosting.

To host website in Windows Azure you need to setup webserver (IIS or httpd) and a FTP server configuration to upload your data, virtual host (optional), assigning the site accessible through port 80, firewall configurations... So for small scale websites use shared hosting.

Azure is something like dedicated hosting account or VPS, its a PssS, IaaS by Microsoft.

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  • That's not the question, though. I do host my site somewhere else at the moment, I'm curious as to how I'd do it through Windows Azure. – JacobTheDev Apr 16 '13 at 21:05
  • azure is like VPN server , they are giving the windows platform hosted in cloud as a service , you can install webserver apps like how you are doing in your local machine.. and open the firewall port for IIS or httpd and set the IP of your Azure machine in your domain DNS manager 'A' reocrd – asvignesh Apr 17 '13 at 10:26
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    This answer is simply incorrect. Windows Azure Web Sites takes care of all setup for you: just take your code (node, .net, python, php), deploy it (via ftp, git, bitbucket, github, dropbox, etc.), set up auto-scaling, etc. and you're done. – David Makogon Jul 13 '13 at 21:41

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