I’ve been using Microsoft Azure for a long time, and as part of my work I’ve generally had access to a Visual Studio Subscription, which comes with a decent chunk of Azure credit (at least $50 a month in local currency, up to $150 for the high-end subscriptions) to run things. The credit isn’t technically supposed to be used for “production” stuff, but honestly, if my site goes down during a capacity issue or outage, fair play.

I’ve used App Service to host sites that frankly don’t need it for years, and it’s only in my most recent role that I’ve not had access to this. I like it a lot, and recommend it for a pretty wide range of hosting needs for companies.

App Service is very cleverly priced: the free tier is useful to get started, but to get custom domains and TLS, you need the “Basic” tier, which still costs over $10 a month. Not much, but more than I’m generally willing to pay to host a bunch of static content. At one point in the past, the only version supporting custom domains and TLS certs was the full Standard tier, and that’s at least $40 a month.

It’s possible to get static site hosting working on Azure with storage accounts and the CDN, but it’s not possible to provision the CDN with a “free credit” account, so I’ve never investigated how good it actually is.

It was time to move, and I chose GitHub Pages as it seemed pretty easy to set up.

I copied my old static HTML site over to a public GitHub repo, tested github pages URL, then mapped the domain.

Everything seemed to work fine, although I want to use the site more, so I’m going to move my DNS to Cloudflare.