Besides the fact that you are using the free ClearDB plan which is not supposed for production use (and it is not related to Microsoft anyway), Azure website (shared) is a <i></i>preview<i></i> product [1], with no SLA, you should not consider them for any serious use anyway, so you've made two mistakes here.<p>[1] <a href="http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/web-sites" rel="nofollow">http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/web-sites</a>
Here's the take-away from this post<p>* You treated the system's memory like it was some infinite resource. It's not, you need to make sure your application efficiently handles memory and takes measure to ensure it doesn't grow too large. Would you want it swapping on a regular host?<p>* You thought you could get away with a free database that is used for development.<p>You're using an application that isn't built well for shared environments, it expects dedicated hosting.<p>You'd be better off designing your blog around Azure Web Sites, knowing the advantages and disadvantages of the platform and taking advantage of them. Don't try to shoehorn it in.
The bigger question, gone unanswered, is why your WordPress blog is configured such that three users can tap out 512MB of RAM. I run a few nontrivial WP installs averaging a couple thousand hits a day on 256MB VMs.<p>My hunch is that anything that actually <i>needs</i> to tap out 512MB of RAM should be running on a plan that's more than $10/month.
There are sure a number of things to keep in mind when migrating to Azure Web Sites. For instance, since it runs on IIS, Apache configuration files (.htaccess) won't have any effect. And the free MySQL plan is meant for development, not for production use.
So because these guys are either bad at coding, had a site that was on heavy load for that service, or what else you want to call it, an entire platform isn't ready for service? Get real. From everything he told me, if I had a real site & wanted to make use of a lot of things for cheap I'd go for their free tier in a heartbeat.
I'm not sure where you expect to get great wordpress hosting for "10 times less" than $69/mo. That's not very much spend for a commercial website. Pagely, which has the scale economics advantage of doing nothing but hosting WP sites, starts at $24/mo. To hit the baseline level of "production readiness" with Heroku is going to run you at least $85/mo (2 dynos, 1 free, 1 @ $35/mo + $50/mo postgres instance).<p>If Azure really wasn't sending log events that memory quotas were being exceeded then I agree the alerting leaves something to be desired. But the DB quota was clearly sending "database error" log messages. Dunno what else you want them to do there.
The free/cheap tier is pretty limiting especially for many modern CMS and unoptimized PHP type things.<p>If your CMS is caching, big memory footprint and some DB thrashing.
If you aren't caching, big DB thrashing and some memory consumption.<p>I'd like a little more flexibility with the lower tiers since I've been "quotad" by memory limits when caching goes bonkers during CMS updates. Something like short-term overage allowances with warnings.
I think this is a case of you get what you pay for. $10/month is extremely cheap for hosting. Cheap hosts are great for sharing simple sites or (in the case of digital ocean) simple services with little foot traffic.
golden rule of hosting / paas: the less someone pays, the more difficult they will be to satisfy.<p>this holds all the way down to $0 (free), in which case, the customer is almost <i>never</i> satisfied. because they're getting almost no value for no money.
Our SaaS is on Azure Websites until day one and it has been a pleasure to use, since they added the Always On feature and the new SQL Database pricing tier that allows you to have more robusts SQL databases everything runs very smoothly and fast. We can deploy several times a day without having any downtimes, load balancing, etc.
Is it actually common to limit users on cpu/memory use this way? I'd expect the limitations to simply be based on the resources made available to your processes...
I run a Wordpress site on Websites and it works great.<p>Its not cheap hosting (I'm running a business so I just want my stuff all in one place) but it has been very solid when used at Standard with a paid MySQL database option (the free tier is for development - not production).
Funny, I have all my SharpPLM stuff on Azure (free with Bizspark!). So I was going to set up a blog with Wordpress just like you guys did. Same initial experience, it was super easy and quick to get up and running.<p>I haven't fully made it 'live' yet, but this gives me some pause whether I should. I think the WAWS platform is good overall, but there is probably too many layers of 'magic' happening under the skirt for this to be a great solution yet.