: Hosting a website with Windows Azure 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

@Mendez628

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:


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:



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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@Kaufman445

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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