Can I host my blog in Windows Azure?

Question

I would like to migrate my Wordpress blog to something hosted in Windows Azure. I currently pay $125 a year for hosting and would like to bring that cost down. I looked around and found this post that talks about using Wordpress in Azure which sounds like a bad idea to me since the changes necessary to make Wordpress work in Azure probably make it incompatible with automatic updates and would likely require me to manually port any updates to Wordpress myself which I don't want to do.

Are there any blog engines that support being hosted in Windows Azure and is this even cost effective?

Answer 1

Currently Azure isn't very well suited cost-wise for small web apps like blogs. With a Wordpress blog, you'd be much better off with regular Linux hosting. I am using maiahost.com for my Wordpress sites and this costs me about $30 per year per domain. There are numerous other hosting providers who offer budget Linux hosting, so you will definitely be able to cut your costs down with one of these.

Regarding Azure, its current positioning makes it suitable for mid and large-sized apps. A rough cost estimation of a minimal hosting on Azure (one small compute instance[$0.12 per hour] and one small database[$10 per month]) sums up to about $1100 - $1200 per year. Besides, using only one compute instance does not make you eligible for the service level agreement of 99.9% uptime.

Answer 2

I personally use apisnetworks.com for all my hosting. It's linux/apache but you can get a great deal for $50/year with no setup costs. I've used them for about 5 years, have about 5 wordpress blogs hosted and have never had an issue. I don't see a benefit to using Azure in this case.

This isn't endorsed by apis at all, I just think they're awesome and you'd be pleased.