I was never a person to use Microsoft technologies as a platform for development – I am pretty comfortable with Java, Linux (for Dev, not desktop – Windows rules there), etc. But since I started working at MS, I decided to give them a try – specifically Microsoft Azure (I also get some freebies because of being an MS employee, so that gave me a push. Oh, and my last hosting service had a very bad response time, and was also close to renewal. In short, many reasons to try new things).
So I decided to migrate my blog to Azure. First I tries exporting and importing all the blog’s content as explained in the WordPress Codex but that didn’t work. My export file was too large to import it. OK… so I’ll export it in parts (posts, pages, feedback). That didn’t seem to work either. After trying a number of “automatic” solutions that didn’t work, I hat to get my hands dirty.
So I downloaded the contents of my blog from my previous host (using FTP) and created a backup of the database (which I also downloaded). Then, using the WebMatrix tools provided by Azure, I downloaded my clean Azure blog, and overwrote it the contents of the blog I had downloaded before. Lastly, I had to import the database I had saved earlier into my local MySQL instance (which I did using the MySQL Workbench, a really nice product). So I had a locally working wordpress install on my computer, just by changing small things some basic settings in the wp-config.php and changing some obvious rows in the wp-options table.
From here it was very easy – just hit the “Publish” button in WebMatrix – and Voila! My site was up. Now I had to move my domain – and this was also very easy, following the instructions shown here.
After a couple of days it dawned on me that I also have to move my mail server to a new provider, since I am cancelling my current hosting. Once again I decided to try the MS way, and found this very helpful tutorial. It simply works!
So no more paying for hosting, and I also hope that the response time of my site improves. And thank you Microsoft for all the free services (but the UI of GMail is still better than yours). Sorry for not doing a step-by-step tutorial on how I managed the transfer – I didn’t write it down and not it is impossible to replay all the steps 🙂
“We are the Borg … Resistance is futile” –
