How to host html application on Azure

Question

I have a single page html application, that uses a lot of jQuery. The app content (data as xml and media audio/video/image) is (and has to be) provided by blobs on azure account. I don't need any application server.

What is the recommended way to host such single page html application on Windows Azure Environment (Azure is a requirement).

As I do not need any application server, all application files are currently uploaded into single container as Blobs with appropriate content types. It all works very good.

Still, I've seen that Azure has some website hosting capabilities I've been wondering if what I did is appropriate?

Thanks

Answer 1

Windows Azure Web Sites would work well and could be free for the duration. If the constraints of the free offering don't work for you, you can scale out easily.

You could also store your home page in Azure blob storage, but that means users would have to have the full path to it as there's no server configuration to specify a default page. Publicizing your site endpoint via a vanity URL from bit.ly or the like could make that a non-issue though.

Do note though, that by having everything in blob storage, you're incurring a transaction cost for every image, every page, every script access (that's not cached on the browser that is). Depending on the nature of your site and traffic, it could be more cost-effective to leverage something like Windows Azure Web Site for some of this.