Personal Azure Domain NameWhen you’ve created a Azure free web-apps, of which you get 10 for free, you'll find is doesn't support a personnel domain names. Your url will hang below azurewebsites.net.

This blog Picking up from my previous entry on Build a blog I'll explain how you can enable a custom url. This is a simple process and a couple of updates to Azure and your Internet domain Register.

Scale up your Web AppThe first setup is to change the web app scaling from FREE to SHARED and click save.

You do have the ability to increase the instance count from, however as my blog doesn't use a DB server to store thee blog entries and I don't have a shared storage I can only use one instance. If my web-app was to become so popular that I require I would actual need to rethink how I'm storing my blog entries.

Managing Your DomainThe final step on Azure is to add your domain names into via the Configure screen and then clicking manage domains.

I added urls with and without www, while this wasn't actually necessary, as I'll explain next, I do this as good practice.

Adding C-Name RecordsOnce you've logged into your DNS service of choice, I've chosen 123.reg however godaddy is as good. For Web-Apps to work correctly Azure one requirement, a C-Name of www or awverify.www

A C-Name is simple an alias from one dns to another, in this case the one provided by Azure. This is an useful as it simplifies administration and allows the underline IP address to change without effecting access to the site, which will likely happen if Azure need to move web app between server for maintenance or if the underlying server fails; additional we will also get automatic redirects to www.