Meaning of “Always On” setting on Azure Web Site

Question

We are using free BizSpark subscription on Azure and hosting our application as Azure Web Site. We periodically struggle with unexpected site shutdowns what\'s very painful

Answer 1

From Microsoft Azure How to configure websites

Always On - By default, websites are unloaded if they have been idle for some period of time. This lets the system conserve resources. You can enable the Always On setting for a site in Standard mode if the site needs to be loaded all the time. Because continuous web jobs may not run reliably if Always On is disabled, you should enable Always On when you have continuous web jobs running on the site.

If you have things that need to be running continuously you could look at either Azure Webjobs or Worker Roles which would be more reliable rather than IIS threads.