Sunday, November 11, 2018
I would just like to say it's been a while since I blogged about anything. This happened for many reasons, but was mainly due to hectic times at my household and my inability to write short blog posts during this time. I'm aiming to remedy this by trying to be more focused on what I talk about and having a list of quick things to talk about. Anyways, I wanted to talk about how I got this blog to now work with SSL on the Azure Shared App Service plan. To me, this is a big deal.
It's a big deal, because normally you would have to use the Basic plan to be able to use SSL with your web app, but the pricing is way too much to justify, especially since I'm just making proof of concept apps and playing around. So, I'm saving a lot of money and I'm able to make some legitimate apps with decent security.
I started with some google fu and came across two articles. One used a free Let's Encrypt certificate with the Azure Basic plan and the other used CloudFlare with the Azure Shared plan. I mistakenly tried to do the Let's Encrypt route, because I kept reading about how "everyone" was using Let's Encrypt for the free SSL certificates. Unfortunately, I glossed over the part where you need the Basic (expensive) and not Shared (somewhat cheap) plan. That was annoying. I then went for the CloudFlare solution, which was written up by Troy Hunt in a blog post of his. He gives a concise explanation about how it all works with Azure. To sum it up, my traffic goes through CloudFlare to Azure.
No, but it's a great one in terms of budget and having SSL for your web app. I was looking into using Let's Encrypt with other hosting providers, but then I would have to move everything to another server. I'm at a point where I just want to get good enough infrastructure set up for making some basic apps. Maybe when I'm bored one day I'll look into setting something up with Let's Encrypt. The main problem here is that there aren't a lot of good Windows hosting providers available. I would say Azure is the most competitive in terms of what they offer for the price you pay.
CloudFlare with Azure is pretty awesome and the price is right. It's not a perfect solution (it's pretty close), but as my dad likes to say, "What do you expect for free?"