Setup the cloud environment

Setup a hosted service, a storage account and a database server.

RECOMMENDATION: To increase performance, we recommend that you locate your hosted service, storage account, and database server in the same data center. To achieve this, when creating your hosted service create an affinity group and specify the same affinity group when you create the storage account. When creating the database server, specify the same region as the one specified in the affinity group.

1. Log into the Management Portal.
2. Create a hosted service.
   For more information, see How to Create a Hosted Service.
3. In the Deployment options, select Do not deploy.
4. If you do not want to use an existing database server, you must create one.
   For more information, see SQL Azure Provisioning Model.
5. If you do not have an existing storage account, we recommend that you create one.
   For more information, see How to Create a Storage Account.

   NOTE: The storage account is used for logging purposes only. We recommend that you create one, because Sitefinity logs, which are stored in the Logs folder on-premise, are stored in this storage account in a table named WADLogsTable. To view the table, you can use Visual Studio’s Server Explorer (if you have installed Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio ) or a separate tool, such as Azure Storage Explorer.