Moving my WordPress blog to Azure
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I use a maximum of one Google Ad per post to help offset some of my blog hosting costs.
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Here’s a little about my experience moving the hosting of this WordPress blog to the Azure platform.
I had been using Webcity to host this blog for many years. I would constantly receive warnings about CPU spikes from them because their solution doesn’t scale. This led to my account being suspended a number of times this year and in one week last month there were 2 x 8 hour+ unexplained & un-communicated outages for all hosted websites – this pushed me over the edge to look at other solutions. I liked the idea of more stable infrastructure and the flexibility to scale up and down.
Webcity charged me $150AU per year. Using CPanel, I worked out that my total HTTP traffic per month averaged over the last 6 months is 6GB per month. Based on the Azure pricing calculator (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/), this means I should actually be saving around $30 per year by using Azure.
To get started, I logged onto https://manage.windowsazure.com and associated my credit card with my existing Windows Live ID (or whatever it is called now). From there, I simply opened the Azure management website, went to Web Sites, Create a Web Site and then From Gallery:
Selected WordPress, then filled in the site details:
On the next page, accept the new Database name or create your own.
I originally planned to use a migration tool to move across the site configuration and content however I ran into multiple errors no matter which migration tool I tried:
- All-in-One WP Migration
- WP Clone by WP Academy
- WordPress Move
- WP Migrate DB
- UpdraftPlus
- Duplicator
I put this down to the fact that I had a very old and unsupported WordPress theme running plus 6+ years of WordPress customizations. I decided not to use the migration plugin tools and went for using the freshly installed WordPress instance on Azure, picked a new theme, added a handful of useful plugins and then used the native export and import functionality of WordPress to get the old posts across. I then used FTP to copy to uploads directory across.
I remembered that my DNS was hosted with my old web hosting provider, so I upgraded my domain registration provider account to also host by DNS. I entered my handful of A and CNAME records and waited til the next day for replication around the Internet. At the same time, I added an additional A record for migrate.danovich.com.au that pointed to the IP address provided by Azure (screenshot below) and also a CNAME for awverify.migrate.danovich.com.au to point to awverify.migrate.danovich.azurewebsites.net for the purposes of testing before cutting over the remaining DNS records.
After waiting for replication, I went into the Azure management portal –> configuration –> domain names –> manage domains, where I added the new line for migrate.danovich.com.au. I could then use my browser to see that migrate.danovich.com.au was now showing my new website hosted on Azure. The next step was to update my remaining A & CNAME DNS records to point to the IP address or the awverify CNAME that Azure needs for verification.


Once this was done, I could access the website using blog.danovich.com.au or any of the other DNS entries I had added.
Whilst it was very easy to set up a WordPress instance on Azure and relatively easy to import my old content, I’ve had a few issues using Azure – specifically around billing and availability – to the point where I don’t see me continuing to use Azure in the future. I’ll save that for another post…… but overall it was a very easy process to get WordPress up and running on Azure.
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I use a maximum of one Google Ad per post to help offset some of my blog hosting costs.
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Am looking for an alternative to W..city.
What do you now recommend?