A small nifty feature in Azure storage accounts allows you to use them as a web server for static pages.

Much cheaper alternative than setting up an Azure VM with IIS or an Azure App Service Plan.

Clearly, no server side scripting can be used, nor special authentication mechanisms, but if you have a small static business website, this could get you launched fast and cheap.

On your storage account go to the section Data management, and click on Static website

On the right you can see that you have to enable this feature. You can also provide an index page, so your users don’t have to know the index page, and can just go to your URL.

Press Save and your “website” is available. Upload your static pages to the $web container and you’re ready to go. Below I show how my index.html page is presented, which is a basic hello world example in HTML

<html>
    <body>
        Hello <B>World</B>!!
    </body>
</html>

Store it in a file named index.html and upload it to the $web container in your storage account.