Hi there,
my blogging is on and off, mainly because I don’t prioritise this above my work, friends, family, etc. This doesn’t mean I’m not interested, but most of the time I “do stuff” and afterwards I think I’ve should have documented the steps as they might be beneficial for my future self or others.
That being said, I just moved my blog from self-hosted to the public cloud (Microsoft Azure). When I started with the blog, I installed WordPress on my Synology DS1513+. This decision was driven by multiple reasons:
- there is a 1Gbps FtH connection available
- the Synology is running 24/7 anyway
- no extra cost (I’m Dutch)
- “fiddling” with the Synology and its packages (i.e. WordPress)
Until not too long ago I discovered the WordPress on App Service. As I have a Microsoft Action Pack (including monthly €85,– cloud credits) I decided to check how this setup is working and what extra work is involved.
The setup is pretty straight forward, I followed the Quickstart guide on how to create a WordPress Site on Azure App Service and got the “default”website running. Within WordPress I installed my plugins, exported and imported theme settings and my posts and after 30 minutes my website was hosted on Azure.
Of course I needed to update my URL to point to the correct CNAME and at the same time I added a managed certificate (as described here).This last part (securing my blog) was long overdue and this was a good moment to do this.
One annoyance left, the blog was still accessible via http, so I needed to ensure this site was accessible via HTTPS only. For this I fired up the Azure CLI, and updated my webapp
az web app update --https-only true --name MyBlog --resource-group MyRG
I didn’t encounter any issues during this move, and will decommission WordPress on my Synology (and free up some resources over there).
As of now my blog can be reached via https://blog.damen-online.nl or via https://blog.pmdconsultant.nl This last domain is used as my business domain (mainly email), so it’s good that the blog is also reachable via this one.