How do I store files on Windows Azure Web Site?

Question

I just read an article about Windows Azure Web Site and would like to evaluate this service. My company just developed an ASP.NET MVC based website that enables our customer

Answer 1

If you want to persist files in Windows Azure (Web Sites) you should use Blob Storage. Features that you might like:

• All files uploaded here get an URL like this: http://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/somecontainer/somefile.txt
• You can use a custom CNAME to get http://files.mycompany.com/somecontainer/somefile.txt
• You can apply security to blobs through shared access signatures
• Blob storage is very cheap
• Every blob is replicated across three computers in a Windows Azure datacenter. Writing to a blob updates all three copies, so later reads won’t see inconsistent results.
• Geo-replication replicates your Windows Azure Blob and Table data between two locations that are hundreds of miles apart and within the same region (i.e., between North Central and South Central US, between North Europe and Europe West, and between East and South East Asia).
• Limited to 100TB per storage account

Sending emails on the other hand is not possible with Windows Azure. You'll need to do this through a third party. I personally use Amazon SES but SendGrid is also a good option since they have a special offering for Azure users.

Answer 2

I recently was using azure web app to show a client how the development was going. In my scenario, when in production it would execute in a dedicated server with access to the file system so I could not use Azure Blob Storage. The bright side is that Azure Web Apps come along with storage(whose size will depend of the tier the app is in), you can access it through D:\home\site\"your path", that storage is explained in the following link Microsoft. You can access them by FTP (explained here Accessing files via ftp).

Hope it helps :)