How do you get an existing domain you own to point to Azure's servers?

Question

By default, the naming conventions of Azure websites/webapps are somesubdomain.cloudapp.net and somesubdomain.azurewebsites.net. If I have an existing website that I have currently hosted through, say GoDaddy, and the website is www.mysite.com, how can I tell the registrar (DNS) to look at Azure's servers for the website content (I have experience in changing the nameservers to point to a particular web hosting company's nameservers, but it appears that there isn't a such thing with Azure).

Ultimately what I want to do is go to www.mysite.com and have the content hosted on Azure, running on Azure's VMs. Is the only way to mess with the CNAME, A, etc. properties of the DNS?

I have a VM on Azure that I want to use to host my websites. This is the platform that I will be using. I'm not using an Azure "website" or a "cloud service".

Solution 1

Yes, the only way to get this working as you describe it is to fiddle with the DNS, with a CNAME and A records.

A good description of how this is done can be found here: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/common-tasks/custom-dns/

Solution 2

There is an official documentation, relatively easy to find with a simple internet search:

• How to use custom domain with Cloud Service and Storage Account
• How to use custom domain with Azure Web Sites

EDIT

One thing good to remember is that a Windows Azure Virtual Machine (IaaS) runs in a Cloud Service. Meaning that for each VM, or set of VMs you have a cloud service created (i.e. mywhateverVM.cloudapp.net). This cloud service is implicitly created when you use the portal wizard to create the VM. Or explicitly (you create it) when you create VMs with PowerShell.

So the "How to use custom domain with Cloud Service" applies also for the Azure VMs with no change at all.

Comments

[Sam Hobbs]

See Azure DNS. Apparently it was not available when this question was asked.

[Mike Marks]

I forgot to mention, this is on an Azure VM, not a website or cloud service. I created a VM, installed IIS, and I want to be able to host websites from it but need to know how to fiddle with the CNAME, etc. at a VM level.

[Fore]

If you create a VM, you would still get a *.cloudapp.net adress to the machine. You would handle this the same way as a cloud service.

[Dennis Burton]

We do this with our build server. It runs on a Windows Azure VM. We have a CNAME mapping build.ourdomain to the VMNAME.cloudapp.net. Make sure you have an endpoint opened up for port 80.