domain without www not working, but with www is working on Azure

Question

we have a site that we recently moved to Azure, did the DNS mapping for www.sitename.com and also for sitename.com however when I access the site without any www prefix, it throws up an error. when I provide www. prefix it works fine.

what could I be missing ?

Answer 1

Within Azure go to Domain Mappings and make an entry for sitename.com in addition to www.sitename.com ! that worked for me.. I remember trying to do that earlier, but Azure did not allow the entry without a www. originally (about a month back) but now it accepted and started working immediately.

Answer 2

I also couldn't add my domain to Azure without the leading "www.". I realised that I should have had two CNAME DNS records set up instead of just one.

I had the following set up:

awverify.www CNAME awverify.XXXX.azurewebsites.net

But in order for you to register your url without the "www." prefix, you need to set up another CNAME in order for Azure to verify. I then added the following:

awverify CNAME awverify.XXXX.azurewebsites.net (as you can see I have added the same as above but the awverify doesn't have the suffix of ".www".

I could then verify Azure against the new CNAME record allowing me to register my url without the leading "www." with Azure.

Answer 3

As for April 2016.

If using A Record it's necessary to add CNAME for awverify.* subdomains. Azure needs that to assure that you have access to a given domain (A Record points at virtual IP that Azure gives)

When using CNAME it's only a case of adding a proper host and pointint it at *.azurewebsites.net. What's easy to forget is that when you want to point 'no www' domain ex. yourdomain.com at your Azure app host has to refered as @.

After that it's only a case of adding you custom domains in app panel. As for now (new Azure panel) it is:

your app -> Settings -> Custom domains and SSL -> Bring External Domains

Answer 4

Wanted to coontribute an update to this thread since it just helped me out.

We have a custom domain in Azure that I needed to forward to our company's SharePoint Online (O365) account and couldn't get the non-www instance of the domain to forward.

In the Azure custom domain manager (GoDaddy), I was able to use the "Forwarding" option to specify that the domain be forwarded. This created an A record for www which forwards fine. There was no other way for me to add an A record for @, but in the "Subdomain" config of the Forwarding pane, I was able to enter "@" and specify the O365 address as the destination. This created an A record for @ and set it to forward correctly.