Tonight I completed the migration of this WordPress blog to Windows Azure.
I was having performance and health issues with the VM that I was renting from a local hosting company. The admin portal was proving to be a nightmare. I had upgrade the VM but the VM wasn’t upgraded. The hard disk was filling frequently and killing MySQL, and therefore killing the WordPress blog.
Why was I on a VM? Because I needed more processor & bandwidth capacity.
A failure last week led me to look at my options. I’ve grown comfortable with Microsoft Azure so this was the place that I decided to move to. My free €75 credit per month thanks to my MSDN account doesn’t hurt either!
I looked at the website hosting options but they provide too little disk space. The VMs, even the smaller ones, give you loads of disk space. I decided to fire up a cloud service, blob, virtual network and a small VM instance just for my new web server VM. I installed IIS, added the sites, installed PHP, WordPress, MySQL, and a few other bits and bobs and started the laborious process of migrating from the old VM.
I could have cheated but I decided to do a fresh install. It was more time consuming, especially when I had to split the WordPress export file into 40 smaller export files (the import of 2MB files was timing out). I added and configured all the plugins. And then the final steps:
- After some tests I configured the website to bind to aidanfinn.com and http://www.aidanfinn.com.
- I changed the DNS A records for those two URLs to switch to the public IP of the Azure cloud service.
My next steps will be:
- Configure MySQL automated export
- Deploy Windows Azure Online Backup to backup the IIS Inetpub folder and the MySQL export
And maybe I’ll configure the endpoint monitoring option in the Azure portal 
mysqldump.exe -u username -p database > database.sql would be the fastest way to copy a database 🙂