While Azure Marketplace features thousands of apps, it’s also home to services offered by top Microsoft partners. The experience of a managed services provider (MSP) partner can be very useful when it comes to Microsoft Azure implementations requiring specialized technical expertise. An MSP partner like Apps4Rent has done the work of installing complex software on popular operating systems, designed to be hosted on Azure.
Wade Dubey, Senior Manager at Apps4Rent, describes one such case: Developers looking to implement a commercial-grade instance of WordPress on Azure often find there’s a lot to do under the hood to make it production-ready and able to scale up. Apps4Rent has figured out a path to success with WordPress installations, offering a ready-to-go image that includes default settings. Get WordPress on Windows Server 2019 from Apps4Rent now in the Azure Marketplace.
With Azure, you get multiple redundancies, such as availability set, availability zone, and geographical regions, which help you run the website 24/7 without worrying about downtime. Below are some specific technical considerations for WordPress on Azure:
• Moving to a third-party MySQL vendor: The free version of MySQL database is an asset included with the WordPress template that has a very high latency, not ideal for production purposes. Other third-party databases can be used for setting up WordPress on Azure.
• Optimizing WordPress to run on Azure and boost agility: It's important that WordPress and all its plug-ins run smoothly on Azure. Developers will need to use the IIS URL rewrite module instead of the commonly used mod.rewrite. In the Azure environment, a specific plug-in needs to be installed to improve stability between WordPress and the database.
• Evaluating and configuring the products and apps: Once everything is set up, there needs to be a review of all the products and apps integrated with WordPress. An SSL certificate needs to be obtained, configured, and enforced to check compatibility with the system. Also, the number of installed virtual machines (VMs) with WordPress needs to be defined to ensure scalability is never an issue.
Using WordPress on Azure opens new possibilities for all WordPress administrators. They have the power to choose the availability sets, zones, and geographical locations that can confer numerous benefits, such as:
• Uptime guaranteed by Microsoft: If your requirements for WordPress are limited to a single-instance VM, you can use premium storage for the OS disk and the data disk with Premium SSD or Ultra Disk. This way, you will have at least 99.9 percent VM connectivity guaranteed by Microsoft. This is particularly useful for bloggers who might scale later when traffic grows but who are currently satisfied with their resources. If you need high availability and have a demanding SLA, you can deploy at least two VMs into an availability set. Microsoft guarantees at least 99.95 percent uptime this way. It's recommended, though, to convert the traditional storage of VMs to managed disks for better functionality of the VM.
• Excellent loading time: The end goal of WordPress is to make beautiful websites that load fast and deliver a great user experience. With the use of Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN), WordPress can be integrated with services from Akamai and Verizon. Azure CDN enables customers to select the right solution to fulfill their requirements and host a WordPress site that loads blazingly fast. Note that an Azure subscription is required to use Azure CDN.
• Best-in-class Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS): Azure provides a native disaster recovery solution for apps and services running on a VM. In case of a disaster, all your important data can have an automatic failover to the nearest possible Azure location. This ensures you always get high availability for your WordPress site.
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