Azure Web Apps is a part of Platform-as-a-Service provided by Microsoft Azure. PAAS is the category of Cloud computing, where the platform is provided to the customer to develop, run, and manage Web Applications without the complexity of building or maintaining the infrastructure by the customer. You can create and deploy the Websites without creating the Server or installing IAS or whatever Web Server you really want to use.
It is almost similar to the traditional method of hosting Services provided by hosting providers used to provide some FTP to upload the Webpages and applications with some added benefits like high performance, a portal for customizing and geo locations and much more. You are free to use any platform and languages (.NET, PHP, Python, node js) to develop your websites for hosting in Azure. There are three options for you get your app live in Azure which are Azure Web Apps, Virtual Machines and cloud services. Microsoft claims that 95% of what you do with web applications can be done with websites and they always recommend you choose that option.
Generally, there are two steps involved in making a web app or website live. One is creating the Website, where you install IIS and create the environment and the second one is publishing, where you actually load your Web pages or an app to the environment.
The steps given below are involved in creating a Website.
URL
You have to pick a unique URL with *.azurewebsites.net domain, which you can link to your custom domain later.
Subscription
Select the subscription, if you have multiple subscriptions linked to the same account.
Resource Group
Link to an existing or create a new resource group for which the Web app has to be added. You can read more about the resource group here.
App Service Plan
Link to the existing or create a new app Service plan for your app. The app Service plan will be pointing towards a pricing tier in which you have to select from the available option.
You can have a look into all the resources available, from which I am selecting a free plan, where it will not cost anything for your app but explains limitations like you can’t have a custom domain for an app with the free plan. The cost and resources available can be seen in each plan.
Once you select everything and create the Website, after some time; you can see it running on your all resource tabs with all the details. You can test the domain from any device and it will land on the default page as we have just created the Website.
You can get the FTP host name, if you love to deploy using FTP. From the deployment credential tab, you can set the credentials to access the FTP.