Originally when I setup my blog on Static website hosting in Azure Storage I went with Azure CDN because I wanted to have an SSL endpoint. As of right now, you cannot do custom SSL with static website hosting unless you use Azure CDN.

But then I hit another snag, you cannot redirect the root domain and redirects in general were a bit too complex for a simple project like this one. There is a user voice suggestion for this feature but it remains under review. This started to bother me because I wanted to do redirects with SSL but couldn’t because the I could not install the certificate generated by Azure CDN on the Linux VM I decided to do the rewrites on. All my previous articles were on https://hammertime.tech breaking all of my links from places like Google and Bing, or even worse resulting in the dreaded SSL error.

Fast forward a bit to Cloudflare. In a previous life I used their free plan to protect against attack but that free plan also offers 3 free redirects AND a free SSL endpoint. This meant I could now redirect https://hammertime.tech to www. where my CNAME is setup for Azure Storage. It also meant I could redirect a bunch of my other domains like hammertimetech.com and have all my URLs work how I wanted. Nobody else will probably notice this.. but it’s one of those things I wanted in place - I am weird like that!