I transferred this blog to Windows Azure today. Up until today, I've been hosting this blog from inside my home. While I can boast almost zero unplanned downtime even from my mostly consumer-grade hardware and residential internet connection, I felt it was time to hoist this blog up into a slightly more professional and resilient environment. That way I don't have to worry about backups and hardware failures on my own gear taking down this blog. And it gives me more flexibility in terms of being able to tear my home lab apart and rearrange it without having to affect this blog.
It was very easy to move the blog to the new VM on Azure, which is good, because I've been so busy at work lately that I've had time for little else... such as blogging. I had to sign up especially for the "preview" of VM hosting from Azure, as it is apparently still in the preview phase. You get about a 50% discount until it goes General Availability. Anyway, both the virtual machine and the portal have both worked perfectly so far and I would not be surprised if it was really close to GA. The portal looks nice, polished, and works well. Comes with a nice, basic resource monitor so you can see your VM's CPU, memory, network usage, etc. over time from the web portal. The price is pretty low. Definitely lower than some other providers. My external IP address won't change. Plus they can host Server 2012 VMs, which some other providers are still catching up to. I chose the absolute slowest, lowest-spec VM that they would give me, because of the price. So the machine is a little slower than it was running on my own gear, but it's still enough for this measly blog. After the VM was done being imaged, I loaded IIS and SMTP on it, simply dumped the whole inetpub directory straight from my home machine into the VM, configured SMTP (so comment emails can be sent from this blog to my Gmail account, etc.,) and then turned the GUI off on the server with Powershell and logged out. Piece of cake.
Azure actually offers a lot of different hosting capabilities - not just virtual machines. In fact I don't think Azure even realized that they would offer IaaS when they first set out. But I chose the VM option because I'm most comfortable managing the OS myself... learning how to set up Visual Studio to publish websites from my desktop straight into an Azure service is totally new to me and I haven't even begun learning how to do that yet.