I talked about few times about using Azure for Websites and Host Services like build Wordpress blog easily with Windows Azure Websites.

Recently few people asked me how to create a custom domain name for the Azure Websites or the Services/Apps hosted on Azure.

For example, take my blog as an example. When I created the my blog on Azure, it will give me a URL like http://ricqi.azurewebsites.net. It is not too bad, but it is a bit too long for me to promote my blog to everyone i meet. I do have a registered domain name http://ricqi.com. Ideally I would like to use that for my Azure hosted blog.

There two detailed documents about this

However there are still some confusions out there. Here is how i do it with my own blog. Hope this serves as a good reference for you. Step 1. This is specific for Azure Websites. The Azure website custom domain name is only supported for Shared or Reserved website mode. Go to Web Sites -> scale, make sure your web site is configured for either shared or reserved mode.

Step 2. Configure the DNS entry for your domain. My domain http://ricqi.com is registered with GoDaddy.com. I will go to the GoDaddy.com portal to configure the DNS settings.

Under A (host) create following two records

Under Points To, enter the IP address for your Azure Websites. Go to windows azure portal, you can find this under Web Sites-> Configure-> Manage Domains, the IP address for your Azure Web Sites.

Then under CNAME (Alias), create following two records.

Step3. Go to windows azure portal, under Web Sites-> Configure-> Manage Domains. Add your custom domain names for Azure Website as below.

Typically add both www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com