Ever since I started this blog, I’ve hosted it internally on our premises. Part of the reason for this was that I wanted to have full control over what was going on with it, and I wanted to work in a familiar environment. For me, that was of course the Microsoft stack. While SharePoint has excellent blogging features, made even better by the Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition, my feeling is that its feature set is more applicable to an inside the firewall deployment. Also, if I were to use SharePoint for this purpose, I’d be constantly distracted by the desire to improve upon it.
What I needed was a platform that was focused on blogging, and that I wouldn’t wind up tinkering with too much. I settled on WordPress, which seemed to be very well supported, and quite good at what it did. WordPress had direct integration with Windows Live Writer, and had apps for the iPhone, Blackberry, Android, and now Windows Phone 7.
WordPress natively runs on PHP and MySQL, and typically runs in Linux environments. However, since IIS supports PHP and MySQL runs on Windows, it is possible to get it running in my “familiar environment”. Normally doing this sort of thing is a bear, but by using the Web Platform Installer from Microsoft, the installation was a breeze. All that was necessary was to run it, and select WordPress as a desired application. The installer then took care of downloading PHP, MySQL, WordPress, and integrating them all together. After answering a few account and password questions, I was up and running, and have been ever since.
The one drawback of this approach was that I was hosting it myself, and therefore always concerned with reliability and uptime. More importantly it has been sharing a server with other applications, and more than once has gone down because another system needed a reboot, crashed, or something. A hosted environment was obvious, and since I’ve been exploring the Azure platform lately, I thought I’d see what was involved. One of the advantages of the MVP program, which I’m newly a part of is that you are allocated a certain amount of Azure computing hours, so off I went experimenting.
Happily, one weekend later, this blog has been transitioned to a high speed, and highly available platform, that most importantly, I don’t have to maintain. Not only that, but I’ve been able to take MySQL out of the picture completely, and I’m using a SQL Azure database as my data store. I had several false starts right away, and I’m going to document the approach that I took and post it here shortly, but for now, I’m pretty happy with the results.
Hello Azure!