Moving to WordPress Azure
As of today agilemobility.net is hosted in Azure.
Since 2009 agilemobility.net has been hosted at siteground.com – a great service for hosting stuff but since I do a lot of work with Windows Azure I thought it also was right to do the same thing with my own blog.
The process of moving wasn’t all plug and play…. mostly because there is no really good mechanism in WordPress to transfer complete blogs from one hosting partner to another.
here’s how I did it.
- Create the new website from the Azure Gallery with WordPress.
- Export all content from your old WordPress blog using tools -> export.
- Use 7zip (or any other tool) to create a GZIP archive (*.gz) of your export XML file.
- Import the compressed archive into your new WordPress blog.
When I did my import I selected to download images and media content with the xml import. That did not work very well.. a lot of images was not downloaded so leave the option unchecked.
The next thing you do is this:
- Download all content of your old blog “Uploads” directory (all images and media content)
- log on to the Windows Azure Portal and go to the dashboard for your new web site and launch “Webmatrix” from the bottom toolbar.
- Choose to edit the live site directly
- When you see the site explorer in Webmatrix, drag and drop the content of your old “uploads” folder (the old content) into the Webmatrix inside /wp-content/uploads.
WebMatrix is not very good with progressbars and it might look like it’s all frozen, but you’ll see the folder name change now and then depending on the size of your uploads folder.
If you want to have all the same plugins and widgets in your new blog download and copy them into Webmatrix like you did with the images.
I did not find any way to restore or import widget, blog or theme settings so i had to replicate that from my old with side-by-side comparison.
Now you have a blog up and running with the address http://.azuewebsites.net but your uses are probably used to access your blog through a custom domain. Here’s how you configure your domain with Azure Websites.
- You need to have access to or tell your DNS provider to make changes for you in the DNS server for your domain.
- Log into the Azure management portal and go to the dashboard for your site. Choose “Manage domains” from the bottom toolbar.
The next steps assume you already have a blog up and running, and that you don’t want to take it down while you configure DNS for the new blog..
To create an “old-school” sub domain like www.yourdomain.com:
- Create a CNAME record in DNS named awverify.www.yourdomain.com that points to awverify..azurewebsites.net
- When you can do a DNS lookup anywhere and get a confirmed answer that awverify.www.yourdomain.com exists, enter www.yourdomain.com in the domain manager text box. The text box will then verify that the awverify sub domain exists and let you save the domain.
- In your DNS server create a CNAME (if it doesn’t already exist) and point it to .azurewebsites.net.
To create a root domain like yourdomain.com
- Create a CNAME record in DNS named awverify.yourdomain.com that points to awverify..azurewebsites.net
- When you can do a DNS lookup anywhere and get a confirmed answer that awverify.yourdomain.com exists, enter yourdomain.com in the domain manager text box. The text box will then verify that the awverify subdomains exists and let you save the domain.
- In your DNS server change the A-Record of your root domain to point to the IP address you get in the bottom of the azure “Manage custom domains” window.
The final step you should do is set up auto-scaling for the blog to keep it responsive and fast.
