As we use an IIS Core based system, Azure or any other windows webserver hosting is the logical first choice, however read on about the framework to see more possibilities.

For the .Net Framework we use .NET 6/7 and soon 8. This is a cross-platform framework, so we can package up the website to a docker container in order to run on Linux hosting.

This is a bit more time-consuming, so will cost more, but your monthly fees may be cheaper.

The major advantage of containerisation is that we can then move the containerised site to a new host without much hassle.

We can also host this with the CMS developers using Umbraco Cloud, this has the advantage of auto-updating your website. This runs within Azure, but all the complex hosting management is handled for you.

We can setup using mysql for linux based servers, but the standard install of our content management system runs on SQL server. This can either be a local install or a hosted service such as the SQL servers found on Azure.

For filesystems (retrieving images etc.) we can either host on a Blob on Azure or on the server filesystem itself.

Typically a blob will be quicker and Azure blob filestorage is surprisingly cheap, but with cheaper and cheaper SSDs becoming available for server architecture a simple website should not be too taxing on a local filesystem either.

In the future we are looking to implement a NoSQL database into Umbraco in order to speed up large amounts of data retrieval, but this is a huge project so it may take some time.

The content managament system we have chosen is Umbraco.

It is the easiest system we have found for clients to use for both simple and complex websites, is very secure and can be heavily customised if required. This system is used in enterprise multi-tenanted systems, and it is used on this website.

We can set this up to run headlessly if you wish to use an external static site generator.

Read more about it Here

We use HTML 5 & CSS 3 primarily using JQuery simply for dynamic page additions.

For more dynamic and faster responsiveness we are looking into moving to using Blazor in the future.