Although I’m a .NET developer, and I haven’t used the LAMP stack for a number of years, when it came to creating this blog, there was no choice other than WordPress. Its well established, quick and easy to set up a WordPress blog, and this can be polished and finished off with little effort and the help of carefully selected plugins.
Having an Azure account, I couldn’t help but consider how Azure compared to Linux for running WordPress. Microsoft is clearly putting a lot of effort into Azure and the latest versions of ASP.NET, and Azure is coming on leaps and bounds as a result.
I was pleased to see that setting up a MySQL database is now a lot easier in Azure, with an unlimited number of free MySQL databases available through ClearDb. You can also run WordPress in multi site (if you run more than one site like I do) and share the same database, although I haven’t tried that.
I set up some example sites on Azure and Linux. The Azure sites were real Azure sites, not on a VM.
The first thing I noticed was the email needed setting up on Azure. Using the Swift Mailer plugin and SendGrid, this was easy to set up so that forgotten password and other emails could easily be sent (SendGrid provides a SMTP server for emails – this appears to be a good service that I’ll consider using and recommending for other websites, not just WordPress ones).
There were a couple of themes that didn’t work properly, so I would say WordPress on Windows from my limited experience is about 99%.
The one thing I did note though, is that performance was far superior on my shared Linux account in Germany than the North Europe Azure in Ireland. The startup times and also the response times when editing pages was markedly different – Azure took a few seconds and the Linux sites were instant. I’m guessing its not the MySql databases either, but I could be wrong there. So I’m staying with Linux for the foreseeable future.
