Custom Domain name for Azure

Question

I'm new to Azure, but rolling out Umbraco over Azure. I've used the Umbraco accelerator to kick off the CMS. I've got the mysite.cloudapp.net domain and I've asked our ISP managers to add a CNAME custom domain name of website.mycompany.co.uk but it's not working correctly. If you are familiar with Umbraco and the accelerator, the website.mycompany.co.uk points at the Webrole_IN_0_Web default.aspx and the mysite.cloudapp.net is set up to show a totally different page and IIS website.

My question is why does the address I asked our ISP to setup point to a totally different page? Have they correctly mapped the CNAME? I've read about CDN in Azure, do I need to do anything with this?

Many thanks.

Answer 1

This Windows Azure team post introduces the CDN and describes how to use a CNAME with it.

Answer 2

Thanks for the post Neil. I notice that this post describes Storage Account custom domain names, I'm probably getting mixed up with the Azure jargon but I want to direct website visitors to a specific page: website.mycompany.co.uk/umbraco/login.aspx Do I still need to follow this CDN tutorial?

Answer 3

The CDN is useful if you want to provide lower-latency access for static content to your users. You do not need to use it. Custom domain names for a storage account or the CDN is a convenience allowing you to do things like host a website on www.mycompany.co.uk and static content on blobs.mycompany.co.uk, for example.

Answer 4

Hi Cavan,

As per my understand, when you use website.mycompany.co.uk to visit your site, it displays Webrole_IN_0_Web, when you use mysite.cloudapp.net, it displays a totally different site. If so, I think CDN does not have relationship with your issue.

This behavior occurs because there is a binding concept in IIS. When using Umbraco accelerator to deploy web sites to Azure, actually these sites will be hosted within IIS in all role instances. Umbraco accelerator is deployed as an Azure service which has only one public IP address. We can deploy multiple web sites in one Umbraco accelerator and these sites share the same IP address. To determine which site should be reached, there is a host header (domain name) property in the binding information.

So if you want to use website.mycompany.co.uk to access that web site, when deploying, you might input website.mycompany.co.uk as the host header (domain name). And also adding a CName record for website.mycompany.co.uk pointing to mysite.cloudapp.net is needed.

Further learning: Understanding IIS Bindings. 

Thanks.

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Wenchao Zeng
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Answer 5

I pretty much wrote the Umbraco solution accelerator, so I should be able to help. :-)

The folder name where you upload your site to blob storage should be called website.mycompany.co.uk, and you should have your ISP to add a CNAME record that maps that domain to mysite.cloudapp.net.

If that's set up correctly, then your site should appear when you browse to website.mycompany.co.uk. If you browse directly to mysite.cloudapp.net, you should see introductory text explaining how to use the accelerator. Both are being served from the same application, but they use the host header to decide what to show.

I hope that makes sense, and let us know if you're still having trouble.