I’ve been thinking about moving my website to Azure for some time now, and when my web hosting provider decided to move me to a higher-priced plan without telling me, I decided it was a good time to make the switch. Moving my blog here has been incredibly easy, and Azure opens up a lot of opportunities for development.
Even as a developer, Azure can be a bit intimidating. Azure is an incredibly powerful platform; you can run VMs, run bits of code at large scale and blazing speeds, you can create triggers to, say, process files when they’re uploaded. That’s really only scratching the surface, but my point is there is a lot you can do. Microsoft has packed all that in a relatively easy to use interface, but it can still be difficult to navigate at first simply because there’s so much.
Fortunately, there’s a WordPress app service template that you can set up in a few clicks. Within seconds, you have a fresh WordPress install. Moving my content to the new site was easy because WordPress is awesome and has a fantastic backup and restore tool built-in.
Getting my DNS settings configured properly took a little longer, but I managed to fumble through it. After I created a DNS zone in Azure and switched to their DNS servers, I was able to configure all my entries within Azure, so I don’t even have to go to my domain provider to fiddle with them anymore.
All this power and the possibilities don’t exactly come cheap. My previous hosting plan was about $10/month (which they were raising to $12/month), and hosting just my blog on a shared plan (so I can use my domain name) will cost about $9.50/month, not including the database (which I can probably move to save some additional money). There’s a free tier you can use for development and testing, but you can’t use a custom domain to access the application (you have to use your azurewebsites.net address), so it’s not the best option if you’re trying to host something more publicly available.
Overall I’m satisfied with this initial step into Azure. The chance to work on some more interesting projects will be fun, and the ability to easily scale if I ever develop something successful is nice. I’ll try Azure for at least a few months and see if it’s the right place for me.