Lost Opportunity
It is baffling to me why Microsoft Azure is not putting an extra effort on making WordPress site run faster in their Azure Web App Service PAAS offering. I started to play around with a image container for WordPress in Azure with MySQL. The experience was very straight forward to create the app and host it straight from the marketplace.
I started the experience by choosing a P1V1 (1 vCpu and 3.5 GB memory) instead, cheap and very small, it came up and I was able to start customizing the site but the backend experience was horrible. Almost 6 to 7 seconds to save or update anything in the backend.
Please remember that this setup cost expectation was about $74/month give or take.
So I went ahead and Scaled up the system to P2V2 (2vCpu and 8 GB memory) did not see much improvement whatsoever and now we are talking about a minimum of $145/month. Not optimized for WordPress site whatsoever. I believe that is a lost opportunity knowing how many millions of web sites worldwide running on hosted WordPress.
People have tons of options for WordPress hosting like WPEngine, Flywheel, DreamHost and many others… Mind you much much cheaper than paying $145/month on Azure with split second posts and update in the backend.
AWS got this one right
I decided to go and try this out on AWS just to see if there is a difference. I ended up running this experiment in 2 different ways. The first one using an EC2 instance with a Bitnami image for WordPress and then I created another instance using AWS Lightsail.
They both worked within minutes using the t3small instance for the EC2 and 1vCpu and 2 GB memory for Lightsail. I was really surprised how well both performed. It is obvious AWS felt it was necessary to concentrate on the performance of WordPress sites on their platform.
I am a big Azure fan, yes I am certified on all 3 public clouds, Azure, AWS and GCP and I would like to see Azure pay more attention to WordPress hosting in the PAAS world. Ignoring millions of potential customers and revenue to Azure by coming in last to other hosts and public clouds is not something that makes me happy as a Microsoft lover and supporter.