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Setting a Custom Domain Name on an Azure Web Site

I recently decided to add a custom domain name to a free Azure website that I use for development purposes. As the FREE Azure web site model doesn’t support custom domains (a shame but hard to complain as it’s FREE) I needed to upgrade the site to the ‘Shared’ mode. This is easily done by the Scaling button in the azure portal.

Firstly however I needed to link my current azure web site to sit under a different subscription to the one I used to set it up. The problem is that cannot move sites between subscription models yet (please fix this Microsoft). To get around this I needed to create a new website under the correct subscription and then publish my web site code to it. Luckily this is easy to do as it’s just a basic website but I can imagine that this could be painful if you have a bunch of storage accounts or a database to re-create.

Using the Azure Portal, creating a new site is a simple process Click +NEW at the bottom of the portal for the menu shown below:

Once created all I needed to do was download a Publish profile (see this tutorial link for how to publish to Azure) for the new site for Visual Studio to use. Once downloaded I opened my VS2012 solution and brought up the Publish dialog. I pointed it to the new Publish profile file and clicked Publish. In just a few seconds I’ve got a new Azure web site up and running with my existing MVC web application. This was very smooth, with no change to config or code required. The sheer simplicity of this impressed me as I was short on time.

Next I needed to allocate my custom domain which as previously mentioned is not available for FREE websites so i needed to upgrade to SHARED mode. From the Azure portal >web site configuration > scale > click SHARED (remember this model incurs a cost).

Once upgraded I could then immediately select DOMAINS and set up my CNAME and A record references, for more information see this useful link (configuring a custom domain name for a Windows Azure web site). It’s worth reading the comments on the post too as it covers issues with registering the domain without the WWW subdomain.

Once the DNS entries had propagated I had my existing site up and running under a custom domain running within a shared Azure instance, all with very little effort.

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.