Years ago when I migrated this blog from the old \u201cunNetwork.blogspot\u201d to AtumVirt.com, I decided to use WordPress. And why not? Azure had a slick \u201cdeploy\u201d feature for the website from the gallery, which promised to do the web hosting, configuration, securing, and updating. Couple that with WordPress having update features and it would be a minimal investment of effort. <\/p>\n
As forward a few years \u2013 the blog has hummed along, I\u2019ve have some fun, geeked out a bit and become a bit more Citrix focused. In addition to all that, I\u2019ve accumulated several semi-regular readers (yaaa) and get quite a few one-off visitors reading various content. In short, my little blog \u201cgot serious\u201d and I do enjoy putting time into making content available when I have time to work on it. <\/p>\n
So, imagine my anger when I received an e-mail that my database was full. It isn\u2019t the first time it happened, and I knew it was going to be problematic when I got the e-mail. The WordPress website from the Azure gallery deploys using a MySQL database, which is a \u201cmarketplace\u201d feature provided by ClearDB. ClearDB has a variety of pricing levels for the services \u2013 the lowest of which is \u201cMercury\u201d (poison\u2026?!) which is limited to 5 connections and a whopping 20MB<\/em><\/strong>. That\u2019s not normally a problem as I hadn\u2019t posted that much\u2026but on a few occasions I went from 10MB to 18MB when I got some renegade spam comments the spam plugin didn\u2019t catch. <\/p>\n When you reach 20MB, everything changes. Writes were disabled, making WordPress virtually impossible to administer \u2013 and somehow I had gotten to 28MB. I struggled for several hours with the limited write access in wordpress trying to remove the spam comments, but alas, I got down to 20.1 MB before ClearDB locked me out. I opened a support case asking for a temporary reprieve, but they just suggested I upgrade.<\/p>\n I\u2019m fortunate enough to pay for my Azure services using Credit<\/em><\/strong>. That means I don\u2019t pay for the service out of pocket. Marketplace services, however, cannot be paid using credit. I found this out after ClearDB told me to upgrade and that it would simply use my billing for the subscription (which \u2026I had plenty of Credit for). Azure support promptly refunded the money to me, so props to them on that.<\/p>\n After hours and hours of trying to get WordPress going, being charged some cash, I decided \u2013 forget it, I\u2019m going to migrate to MS SQL which is supported in WordPress. There was even a gallery \u201cProject Nami\u201d install. Bam \u2013 a few clicks later and a new WordPress instance is setup.<\/p>\n