title: Azure blob storage as a website images source
body: <p>In my web application (MVC5, hosted at Azure Websites) users can upload their profile images. These images are than displayed publicly on the website. As the website is hosted on Azure I decided to give Azure Storage a try.</p>
  
  <p>I created a <strong>public</strong> container and I upload the the images there as <strong>block blobs</strong>. It allowed me to access the images by a public url like that:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p><a href="https://accountname.blob.core.windows.net/photos/photo1.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://accountname.blob.core.windows.net/photos/photo1.jpg</a></p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Moreover I could wrap it with a HTML <strong>img tag</strong> and serve the images to the browser directly from Azure.</p>
  
  <p>The problem is that the images seem to load slowly. 100kb image loads even a couple seconds.</p>
  
  <p>What can be the problem? Does Azure Storage block blob require some startup time? Is that even a correct approach? </p>