If you haven’t noticed, I haven’t been blogging much lately. The main reason for this is because I was tired of running my blog on a slow cloud provider. Up until this past Friday, I migrated my blog to Digital Ocean from Microsoft Azure.  The migration process was super simple and only took about an hour, to get things transferred to my new provider. Before the migration, I was consistently having performance issues with WordPress on Azure. For example, it took forever to publish a simple post, the page would consistently load for a while before I could start writing. Another issue was that updating plugins or other components of my website would cause WordPress to get stuck in Maintenance Mode. The only easy way to get everything working again was to use an FTP client and remove a certain file from the directory structure of my website. However, the main driver for the migration was the price per month to keep a relatively small site like this up all the time. The price was about $200 a month alone. Keep in mind, I also have various servers for the backends for various applications on Azure. After a while, keeping all this up was getting very expensive. I even asked Microsoft what my options were to improve performance and help on how to reduce my price. They had a few good suggestions, which I implemented but it still seemed slow. I had the option to upgrade the server running my blog to something more powerful. The recommended option was out of my price range.

By this point, I was out of options on Azure. I debated on using Amazon AWS but I have nothing but bad experiences with the platform and the Amazon customer support.  However, one night I was browsing some of the posts in some Facebook groups I belong to. Inside one of those groups, I saw someone talk about a service called Digital Ocean. I decided to give it a shot since I was completely out of options. After creating an account, I was shocked at how cheap the prices were. Once the shock wore off, I decided to create a Droplet (VM) for a WordPress site and used a test copy of my website on their for about a week. During that week, I realized how much faster it was compared to Azure and I was not experiencing any of the issues I mentioned earlier. Once I was satisfied, I started to prepare for the migration. This WordPress plugin was instrumental in getting everything working with little downtime. So far I’m a very happy customer, I will still use Azure for my already existing servers. But I’m considering using Digital Ocean for my next big project. If anyone is in the market for a new cloud provider, definitely give Digital Ocean a try.