I previously dabbled with moving blogs off of WordPress.com onto Azure. This is a new story about moving on from there.

Lazy Loyalty

I have stuck with Azure for WP things for a number of years. I guess it’s like a gym membership, you set it up, is costs money, you think it is going to be useful, but you end up feeling it is a waste of a lot of money and the shame grows.

I had the unfortunate and for me unusual position of early adopter, so I had Windows based WP “Azure Web Apps” as they were called back in the day, long before MS ❤️ Linux and all that. The most weak sauce image available at that, backed by the most pathetic MySQL instance possible.

File System Philosophy

As no doubt even the least Windows hating computer guy will gleefully tell you, when the topic of Windows performance comes up, Microsoft bet on the wrong horse when designing NTFS, the file system of the future for the Windows NT Operating system in the late eighties. They thought the concept of an abundance of tiny files was a bygone era, the future was large media files, databases, documents. The file system is pretty good at caching large files fragmented over a physical disk.

Linus “Linux” Torvalds believed in the UNIX principle, believed that thousands of tiny script files would configure the future. In some ways he was right, and definitely in the case of file system performance. Ext4 is vastly superior to NTFS when it comes to storing/hosting websites because, you know it, websites are a shedload of tiny files.

Total Tragedy

So – underpowered cloud instance, wrong file system, cheapest DB… what was the end result? One word – abysmal. It would take 30 to 40 seconds to load a page in the admin interface. Completely unworkable.

So what to do? Well, the move had been arduous enough that I was tempted to just leave it, rather than move it again. I didn’t have another Christmas holiday I could spend on it (I had missed the “maintenance window” for hobby IT as it was already January at this point).

Scaling up?

Azure started offering a Linux based VM that came with WordPress preinstalled, i.e. a grown-up version of what I already had, with four times the virtual hardware as well, with a beefier MySQL instance becoming available as well. But at what cost you ask? Well- a significant one. It was that or all the Sky Sports you can possibly buy – so not worth it. Also, they had no upgrade path, so yeah, it would be like a complete move all over again, and like I wrote, just missed the maintenance window.

Scaling out?

So, instead I tinkered. Added a shedload of plugins. Azure Redis Cache, Azure Blob Storage & CDN and the WP Total Cache plug-in. Tried to smush images, but the admin interface was still too slow, so it was too difficult to remember what you had been doing when the page finally rendered. Now using all of these resources didn’t exactly make things cheaper, but it was more like a couple of movies off Amazon Prime than full on Sky Sports.

In a fit of desperation I even signed up for Cloudflare – which meant that the front office of the site, when cached, was the fastest thing in the universe, from anywhere, but Cloudflare couldn’t fix everything, so the error message of brokenness was very common, ruining the end-user experience.

Scaling down

Eventually after getting yet another Azure billing notification I just went at the Googles and searched for WP HTTPS NGINX or similar, and my filter bubble helped me find Bitnami. This will read like a transcript of a YouTube reaction video, but I don’t know anything about Bitnami, I didn’t want to know. It seems to be a company that knows about setting up Linux boxes. You can either download their stuff or buy AWS or Azure VMs through them, preloaded with their scripts and – shockingly – documentation on how to set it up.

I chose the smallest thing they had fitted with SSD on AWS, it came preconfigured with the correct firewall settings, a WordPress preloaded with useful plugins, and scripts to help you fetch free certificates from Let’s Encrypt and instructions on how to configure NGINX to use them.

Moving on up

The default – empty – WordPress was lightning fast, and the plug-in All in One Migration was most excellent. It has a sidekick that allows you to upload bigger files, you will need that, but overall, that  plugin made the migration a lot less awful compared to the default WordPress Import/Export tool. For the first site, I installed that same plug-in on the old site, downloaded all site data except spam comments, uploaded the File onto the new sites using the plugin and after some confusion when I had to log in with my credentials from the other site, and the browser became sceptical of this site now stating it was somebody it isn’t, but after authenticating and dismissing the security prompt the site was still acceptably fast. I changed DNS to point to this new machine and felt pretty good about myself having moved stuff across – even the media files were working, something that never happens with the normal import.

After the DNS had propagated I configured the lets encrypt stuff and got my padlock back. I started to see traffic and I noticed that there was a slight problem. The admin interface and the WP Rest API were completely broken due to mixed content warnings (crossed-over padlock!). The internet seems so baffled by my error, I presume it Just Works on the more common Apache Bitnami configurations, but that NGINX does some HTTPS termination before the web apps hear anything about the incoming requests, meaning the sites must be set to accept http internally.

By setting a parameter in WP-config.php forcing the admin interface to be loaded over HTTPS, the API started working again and there was much rejoicing.

Basically, a few hours in, the migration I had been fearing for such a long time had completed.

It remains to be seen what the total cost per unit of time will be, but the estimate looks good, at around a third of Azure prices – since one of the new images was made slightly more powerful and thus expensive.