For a while now, I’ve hosted this site on Azure but the instance I had set up has had DNS problems and/or the instance keeps getting put to sleep because it’s a low priority. To be fair, I host another WordPress site on Azure and never seem to have any problems with that one. I’ve used OpenShift at length in the last couple of years and like their pricing model and the way things work online so I’ve moved this site over in the hope that it’ll be more reliable this way. I don’t have any issues with Azure but this problem has been hard to diagnose and it was more expedient to solve things by doing a quick migration.

I’ve been quite impressed with with WordPress since I started using it. The design is elegant and flexible, given the sheer number of installed instances on the Internet, widely used. Overall, I’d recommend WordPress as a hosting platform, although I still have some reservations about PHP as a large-scale development language. I can see how people have enjoyed and leveraged the overall model though.

For anyone interested in the details of migrating:

  1. Set up basic WordPress on OpenShift.
  2. Exported old site via Export Plugin.
  3. Installed missing plugins on new site.
  4. Installed missing themes on new site.
  5. Imported old site onto new setup.
  6. Reset DNS to point to new site.
  7. Deleted old site from Azure.

Setting up WordPress on OpenShift was pretty seamless. On Azure, I remember having to look up the Bitnami image information to figure out how to gain admin access and had to delete the default credentials and create new ones to make it secure. OpenShift lets you deploy in scale-able mode, with load balancing support, creating two VMs, one for MySQL and the other for WordPress itself. The WordPress instance can be replicated dynamically under load this way. Microsoft does a pretty good job with Azure, but while apps that uses the Windows stack are seamless, non-Windows VMs still require a little wrangling. The WordPress scaling option can be slightly more expensive on Azure as well and seems to add more complexity. OpenShift is based on Docker images and which likely to become an interesting option on Azure as that infrastructure becomes more established.