My Experience Moving WordPress From @GoDaddy to @Azure

Recently I got fed up with the lack of answers to my performance problems from GoDaddy with regard to the performance problems that had started randomly showing up that I decided to look into moving our website hosting from GoDaddy to Azure. As a partner we have a bunch of credits with Azure every month that we can use for production services, so we figured why not. And frankly the performance couldn’t be any worse. Page load times with GoDaddy were 5+ seconds, and their answer was always the same; “just disable your plugins and theme and it works fine, so it must be a problem with the plugins and theme”. Except that we had been using the exact same plugins and theme for months without issue.

I knew that moving all the various sites from GoDaddy would be a pain. We have 46 domain names which point to 13 different websites so getting everything over in a way which didn’t impact the users was going to be a challenge.

Step 1 of the process was deciding if we should use Windows or Linux to host the sites. As every one of the sites is either PHP (like www.dcac.co) or just a static HTML file (like www.getazureposh.com) we opted for Linux VMs within Azure. For HA reasons we have two Linux VMs, both of which are A1 VMs. These machines are a single CPU core with 1.75 Gig of RAM. These two machines are behind an Azure load balancer so we’ve got HA. Now we’ve got basically the same CPU power and RAM in each VM that we had before (GoDaddy’s site says that the plan we were on before had 1CPU and 1 Gig of RAM) so we’ve technically doubled our CPU power for total visitors, but a single user should see the same basic performance if it’s a problem with the PHP code in the plugins and/or theme.

For the database server we’ll be using MySQL so we stuck it on a Linux VM as well, with a backup database server using MySQL Replication to mirror the data within the database to the second VM.

Out next decision was where should we be putting these VMs. We opted for Central US as the bulk of our customers are based in the US, so we wanted to have the site centrally located to our users for quickest network access. Because this is Azure if we started to get a lot of customers in Europe (for example) I could simply drop some web servers in Europe and have them access the database servers here in the US (over a site to site VPN between the two Azure Data Centers) and pretty quickly and easily give the Europe users faster access to our website.

After that was all decided I built the VMs. Now being that I’m a little paranoid about security I closed all the firewall holes that Microsoft likes to leave open for new VMs except for http and https. So all the SSH ports got closed as I won’t be accessing them via SSH from the outside as we already have VPN setup into our Windows Azure environment.

The next step was to get all the files for the sites (and the backups of the MySQL databases downloaded). That just to using wget and connecting to the GoDaddy FTP server. It took a while to download everything as some of the sites have a LOT of old junk laying around inside them. Once that was done, the databases were created and all the data for the databases was loaded in. Then Apache was configured along with all the configuration files for all the various websites.

Once that was done DNS was moved over and everything basically started working as expected. There were a couple of glitches with SSL which needed to be addressed. But that didn’t really impact our users, just Joey and myself.

As for performance, everything is MUCH better today than it used to be. Our average CPU performance now that we are on the new machines in Azure is 1.4% with spikes up to 5%, and that’s when I’m going through and patching all the sites with the newest WordPress build and the webpage response time is under a second based on just using the website where we were getting all sorts of timeouts before.

Now I’ve made it look like is was pretty easy, and for the most part it really was. Thankfully I was able to take my time and move site by site moving stuff, slowly getting each time moved across and making sure that each site was setup correctly before moving on to the next website.

Other than speed have I really noticed a big difference? Not really. Using the website is basically the same. The only really annoying thing is waiting for files to replicate between the two web servers as that only happens every 5 minutes (or just VPNing in and forcing them to sync when I want them to sync if I’m doing something specific. But as most everything that WordPress does is done within the database that isn’t that big a deal.

Denny