Traditionally, with web application hosting, we need a separate server or a machine where we set up our web server. With .NET Core, we can develop a web application that can be hosted on IIS if we have the Windows operating system installed on our server, or Apache or Nginx web server if we have the Linux operating system. Setting the machine and web server requires the sufficient amount of time and effort. We need to make sure that the .NET Core runtime has been installed, set up the application pool during deployment, and if our web application is a public website, then we need some DevOps support to make it publicly accessible. We also need to make sure that it is secure and has the latest service packs installed.

With Azure Web Apps, hosting a web application is simple. With a few basic steps, we can deploy any web application on the cloud, which is accessible over the Internet and provides capabilities for doing authentication and the authorization of users, scalability such as load balancing servers, and connecting to the on-premise database servers. The developer or architect hosting the web application on the cloud does not need to get into other details such as setting up a web server, configuration application pool, and so on.

With Web Apps, we can host any web application that is developed on .NET, Node.js, Python, Java, and PHP. When we register a web application in Azure Web App, it creates a public URL, which can be accessed from the Internet. The default URL is {name_of_webapp}.azurewebsites.net, but we can attach custom domains to it as well. We can also use deployment slots with our Web Apps, which enables us to set up different environments such as development, staging and production. Moreover, we can also set up continuous integration, which enables us to configure the source repository where our code resides, like Git or TFS; automatic deployment is done once we check-in or push our changes to that repository.