Why one of the Top100 Blogs moved from AWS to Windows Azure

The Blog I started on Cloud Computing and Big Data some years ago was steadily increasing in the number of people accessing it. CloudVane is also named one of the Top 100 Blogs on Cloud Computing (Source), which is backed by the number of visits I get per day. To meet the increased traffic, I had to scale up my Blog.
There was no question that I am going to use some kind of Cloud Platform. To date, I used Amazon Web Services. As I am always keen on using the newest technology, I decided to use a Platform as a Service Provider. The reasons for that vary: the most important factor is that I don’t want to take care of VM management and alike. The most important aspect I was looking at is to have a platform that eases administration. Ideally I would have only little administration or no administration.
I looked at the 3 most common platforms: Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, Google AppEngine and Windows Azure. After playing with all 3 platforms, doing load-tests, comparing pricing and looking at the scalability aspects of the platform, I decided to use Windows Azure. To me it seemed to be the most mature platform in terms of PaaS (this is my personal opinion after doing some research and don’t represent the opinion of my employer). Windows Azure Web Sites is very easy to handle and the features it offers are great.
Moving to Windows Azure Web Sites was straight forward: I created a WordPress instance from the templates provided in the Windows Azure gallery. After 2 steps of configuration, WordPress was ready to go. I did the 1-click setup by WordPress. The hardest part of the migration was to move the existing blog entries to the new blog; thanks to the Import/Export capabilities of WordPress, this was done within short time as well. Installing the plugins and so on took some more hours, but it went smooth as well.
In the next posts, I will talk about performance and setup/architecture of WordPress on Windows Azure.
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