Azure Static Web App Hosting

Static Website Hosting on Azure Storage.

Speed and SEO

Static sites are faster and speed is a known Google metric particularly on mobile. For example each 100ms reduction in Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), web conversion rate for Farfetch increased by 1.3%.

Secure

Static sites are secure and are not targeted which in turn reduces wasteful traffic and bandwidth. Its a win for you and the environment.

Cost Effective

Reduce your costs with YouDoPhoto and the Azure free plan which provides free storage for 12 months, hosting, SSL certificate, CDN and a custom domain. Microsoft Azure also includes $200 credit towards hosting.

Azure Storage or Azure Web App?

What's the difference between Azure Static Web Apps and Static sites on Azure Storage.

Azure Static Web Apps (SWA) is the azure service for single page applications (SAP) including deployment directly from a code repository via GitHub using a service Microsoft calls AzureDevOps. AzureDevOps monitors a GitHub repository and automatically renders a static site when the repository updated then copies the updated site to Azure storage to be served via the CDN.

This approach is great if you already have a workflow that uses GitHub and you have a content management system content in place to update the content in the repository.

However if you do not then searching for "Azure CMS" will most likely bring up various enterprise CMS systems such as Kentico, Agility, Magnolia or Sitecore. These are all expensive systems hosted on Azure aimed at larger companies.

But what if you are an SME? Fortunately Microsoft provides another option for small business to host the static website on Azure. Azure storage is for hosting a static website and is ideal for an SME. YouDoPhoto is a headless CMS which is integrated with Azure to deploy a static site on Azure storage. For an in-depth comparison see our static web hosting blog page.

Compare Static Hosting

Azure Static Site

Microsoft Azure Static Sites on Azure Storage is the Azure product for static hosting and is ideal for small business and individuals. The free subscription is limited to 2 domains and includes hosting, blob storage, custom domain, content delivery network and generation of SSL certificates. That is the delivery side of the equation, the other side of which is the development and deployment of the site onto Azure.

Single click install Azure CLI.
Azure Edge endpoint setup.

Resource Group Setup.
Custom domain setup.

Azure Setup

Azure Blob Storage

Azure stores your files within a bucket storage that can attach to your resource group and subscription. The container is blob storage and a folder is automatically created for you to upload your content.

YouDoPhoto integrates with Azure to set up blob storage, manage DNS settings and verify the creation of the SSL certificate. After storage has been created the content management system can build a static version of the site locally before deploying using the Azure command line interface to synchronise the local site with the Azure storage account.

Azure storage bucket setup.
Azure includes 5GB of storage free for 12 months

Storage account endpoint.
Verify DNS and SSL status.

Azure Domain

Azure Edge CDN

Azure edge is the content delivery network used by Microsoft to serve static sites from storage. YouDoPhoto automatically creates the CDN endpoint, custom domain and SSL certificate. After a simple update of your DNS records you will be able to use the static site you have created on Microsoft Azure.

After your site has been built using the YouDoPhoto static site generator a single click deploy to Azure invoked the Azure CLI to synchronise your local build folder with Azure blob storage. Before deployment we check the base URL matches the azure domain and generate a robots.txt and sitemap to enable/disable indexing by search engines. Synchronisation includes removing outdated files and uploading new content.

Single click deploy Azure blob storage.
Azure Edge endpoint cache refresh.

Base URL check.
Robots.txt and Meta Noindex.