tl;dr: Using Apache config files to configure IIS doesn't work.
How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production
41–48 of 48 posts
Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production
#42golden rule of hosting / paas: the less someone pays, the more difficult they will be to satisfy. this holds all the way down to $0 (free), in which case, the customer is almost never satisfied. because they're getting almost no value for no money.
Very good point. But the main message I was trying to deliver is not about the bang for the buck, but rather the amount of issues/decisions WAWS tries to offload to the users instead of handling them intelligently on its side. It's not hard to send an email message, or automatically configure web.config knowing the predefined quota, but the impact on customer satisfaction could be huge.
Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried to add php_value memory_limit 128M in .htaccess (it's mentioned in the post), but I wasn't aware that Azure pays no attention to .htaccess and I should've been modifying web.config instead. But I'm a tech guy. As a customer, I would expect Azure to configure the server and PHP on its own and not bother me with the quotas at all :)
You're a tech guy, and you expected IIS to use Apache configuration files? EDIT: And as a customer, you're expecting managed hosting from a service that clearly isn't a managed hosting provider? Yeesh. There really are managed hosting providers in the world, if that's what you want.
Next time somebody will post a post titled 'How Nginx Sucked in Production' and he'll complain about .htaccess files.
Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production
#44The bigger question, gone unanswered, is why your WordPress blog is configured such that three users can tap out 512MB of RAM. I run a few nontrivial WP installs averaging a couple thousand hits a day on 256MB VMs. My hunch is that anything that actually needs to tap out 512MB of RAM should be running on a plan that's more than $10/month.
Please see the details in my post, I tried to limit RAM usage via usual WordPress configuration tricks, but Azure didn't seem to respond. Perhaps an even bigger question is: why Azure hasn't configured the site itself, if it imposes quotas on it.
This is a mistake on your part, because IIS ignores the .htaccess file.
Azure web sites uses a .user.ini file to setup php.
See the documentation here: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-...
Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production
#45Besides the fact that you are using the free ClearDB plan which is not supposed for production use (and it is not related to Microsoft anyway), Azure website (shared) is a preview product [1], with no SLA, you should not consider them for any serious use anyway, so you've made two mistakes here. [1] http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/web-sites
Does anyone have experience with ClearDB? Good, bad, why would you use it?
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Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried to add php_value memory_limit 128M in .htaccess (it's mentioned in the post), but I wasn't aware that Azure pays no attention to .htaccess and I should've been modifying web.config instead. But I'm a tech guy. As a customer, I would expect Azure to configure the server and PHP on its own and not bother me with the quotas at all :)
You're a tech guy, and you expected IIS to use Apache configuration files? EDIT: And as a customer, you're expecting managed hosting from a service that clearly isn't a managed hosting provider? Yeesh. There really are managed hosting providers in the world, if that's what you want.
.htaccess is supported not only by Apache. And I wouldn't be surprised if WAWS supported "at least a subset" of .htaccess configuration keys on Azure, since Microsoft has been trying to make a move into the LAMP world during the latest few years. I would consider it a marketable feature.
If we're discussing terms, then we must have a different understanding of what a managed hosting is. A service that allows you to select an application template, deploys the resources for you, sets up source control software, handles OS patches and host software installation for you, is _clearly not_ a managed hosting? What is then?
EDIT: I do admit that editing .htaccess was my own mistake. Not even sure where it came from actually, since the default WAWS WP template doesn't even contain it.
Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production
#47The bigger question, gone unanswered, is why your WordPress blog is configured such that three users can tap out 512MB of RAM. I run a few nontrivial WP installs averaging a couple thousand hits a day on 256MB VMs. My hunch is that anything that actually needs to tap out 512MB of RAM should be running on a plan that's more than $10/month.
Please see the details in my post, I tried to limit RAM usage via usual WordPress configuration tricks, but Azure didn't seem to respond. Perhaps an even bigger question is: why Azure hasn't configured the site itself, if it imposes quotas on it.
I read the post, thanks. Setting aside that .htaccess is Apache-only, needing to allocate 128M per request in WordPress doesn't ring any alarm bells for you? Every trivial WP site I've ever run worked comfortably with under 64M/request (and then you use use supercache, static caching, etc. to reduce the average individual request to something in the single digits).
Azure doesn't configure it for you because it assumes you're knowledgeable. It reacts more harshly than I'd like for sure if you go over, but expecting you to do your work (for cheap) doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Re: How Azure Web Sites Sucked in Production
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Take-aways that must came with yours: * There is no way to calculate memory usage, it's completely opaque. The first thing the author told was how he was controlling memory usage, but that does not reflect on Azure's number. Also, swapping is a bit better than just having your site taken down with no warning. * Nearly all hosting providers have "free" database providing included in their price. (And until I read that…
I'm not sure I agree with nearly all hosting providers having free database services. Azure seems like it intends to be a competitor to AWS and Rackspace, both of which charge for their cloud databases. AWS RDS Pricing - https://aws.amazon.com/rds/pricing/ Rackspace Cloud Database Pricing - http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/databases/pricing/
It may intend that, and may be a competitor in other services, but at least Amazon do not provide any service equivalent to this one.