As our IT consulting business (www.thefullcircle.com) is a Microsoft partner, we believe it is important that we leverage as much Microsoft technology as possible (eat our own dog food!), and of course, that means Cloud
So, today we have moved our blog site (based on WordPress) over to the Windows Azure web hosting platform.
The process was simple enough with only one hick-up along the way. During the import of the xml file exported from the source there was a server side error importing to the new target – 502 – Web server received an invalid response while acting as gateway or proxy server.
This was a bit of a pain since when I looked not all the posts or media had been imported. I had to go through and delete all the posts and empty them from the trash then reimport. Second time round, it when through fine.
Commissioning the same plugins on the new WordPress instance was simple enough and tweaking the settings only took a few minutes. It was a good opportunity to trawl through the options throughout WordPress to make sure the right once were set in the first place.
Summary of the process:
- Commission the WordPress instance on Azure, needs to be a Shared instance, not a free one
- Go to the new blog on the URL Azure creates for you and do the basic WordPress setup
- Export the xml data from the old blog
- Install and configure the plugins you’ll need on the new blog
- Import the xml files and ensure you tick the box to import the images/media too
- Create the CNAMES Azure needs for verification and public access
Something that I noted, non-Azure specific was that our export was 1.3mb with about 100 posts. The maximum file size for the importer is 2mb. The help info suggest increasing settings on the server, not sure you can do that on Azure..?
Lastly, the Jetpack site stats start from scratch again so you’ll have to accept that the historic info is gone – a shame as we had stats going back to Feb 2008!
(if anyone knows a way round this please share)
If you’d like a more detailed account of the process, let me know in the comments.