While that is absolutely true for IIS and the Shared tier in Azure Websites (although it's fully configurable if you own the IIS box[1]), Dedicated tiers (when you own the whole VM) in Azure have a feature called Always On[2] Where there is no idle Time-out on the app itself, so even if the app remained idle for days, w3wp process won't be killed. Also if the app happen to shutdown for any reason (machine restart, Azure Update, Windows Update, app crash, etc) Azure Websites will make sure to send a request to the app to start it up and warm it, then the app can use Application Initialization[3] to do any more complex warmup