Mike
Tips, tricks and solutions for software developers.
 

Redirect GoDaddy domain to an Azure website

By Mike Gledhill

GoDaddy is a great resource for registering domain names, but damn expensive when it comes to hosting your site.

With Azure (and others, like Amazon Web Services), you pay for the amount of resources (bandwidth, disc space, etc) that you use, rather than having to pay a (high) fixed fee per year, per website, even if your website only contains a handful of pages.

It therefore makes sense to host your website's pages on Azure, and get GoDaddy to silently redirect to these pages, but without the user realising that they're actually looking at a something.azurewebsites.windows.net page.

MikesKnowledgeBase does exactly this.
Your browser is telling you that you're looking at a www.mikesknowledgebase.com webpage, but actually, it's hosted at mikesknowledgebase.azurewebsites.windows.net


I always have problems setting this up, not least because both of the GoDaddy and Azure websites change so often, and it's sometimes hard to find the settings.

Setting up Azure

1
First, make sure your website contents are published to Azure, and that you can access them via a URL such as:
something.azurewebsites.windows.net
2
Next, go into the Azure Portal, which lists your websites.
3
Select your website, then click on "Custom Domains" in the next column.

You'll get a message, telling you that you need to use a Paid App Service to use this functionality. If your site is hosted using a free App Service, you'll need to click on the "Scale up (App Service plan)" menu item, to upgrade your plan.
4
Now, make a note of the IP address shown... we'll need to use this on the GoDaddy website.

Setting up GoDaddy

5
Now, log into your GoDaddy account.
6
In the top right hand corner of the webpage, click on your name, then "My Products" in the popup menu.
7
Find your website's name, and click on the "DNS" button:
8
Now, the fiddly bit.
You need to set several obscure-sounding DNS settings to point to your website, and the IP address from step 4 (above):

Notice the awverify and awverify.www records at the top.
Azure will use these to verify that this is your website, and that you are allowed to redirect traffic from this website to your Azure website.

Back to Azure...

9
Now, head back to the Azure Portal, and in the "Custom Domains" screen, click on the "Add Hostname" button.
You can now type in your GoDaddy's website address, and, if all goes well, it'll validate that this is your website, and it'll let you add this as a new Host.
10
Go and grab a cup of tea.
Some of these changes will take a few minutes to kick in.

By all means, try refreshing your Azure Portal screen, to see if the host has been added, but most of all, just be patient...!


 

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