Too expensive MySQL server for Wordpress hosting

Question

Hi, I'm trying to move my Wordpress blog from my Hostpapa provider to Azure because Hostpapa started to complain about high resource utilization caused by Wordpress itself, there is no planned effort from Wordpress to optimize their stuff, nor I don't have time and energy to contribute to the Wordpress source code to optimize it myself. It is too hard for me to find an alternative to Hostpapa, and most similar providers want to get control over my domain while I want to leave it at a registray where I can configure it freely and point it to whatever hosting or cloud platform I'll choose in the future. I used the Azure App Service to create a Wordpress instance, but that comes with an over-priced MySQL flexible server that causes the whole solution to cost more than 150$/month. I tried to scale down the MySQL server from standard to bursting, but it still costs 150$/month. Is there a way for the Wordpress App Service configuration to use something less expensive as a database. I searched many times for a solution and people repeatedly recommend not to use Azure or create and manually configure a VM running LAMP+Wordpress, which I find too tedious and time consuming. Moreover, I would like images to be stored on Azure Blob Storage, not on the VM disk itself which would otherwise become full too quickly, and Wordpress has no builtin support for that. I cannot figure out exactly how the Wordpress App Service manages to store my blog's images to Azure Blob Storage without using any plugin. Any attempt to search about that systematically points me at pages suggesting Windows-specific plugins, which is a really bad non-sense for me. There must be a Linux solution to store Wordpress media on Azure Blob Storage, AWS EC2 or other cloud storage, but Google points me at the wrong things, again, again and again. Maybe it's time for me to switch search engine, but it will be hard to retrain my muscle memory not to type Google all the times. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

I'm not sure if you started with this WordPress quick start which utilizes this marketplace item but you have the option to choose SKUs more aligned to hobby/personal blog sites. Starting here gives you a Basic Linux app service plan, basic burstable MySQL instance, private link enabled CDN with Azure Front Door profile, and a VNET. The app service plan and MySQL instance should land around $20/month each. You can scale both of these resources up or down as your needs change. The storage account that's created will be geo-redundant, but you can also adjust that to locally redundant to reduce cost.

Using this item will configure all of the application settings for you and all the resources you would need. When you deploy this resource, you can review the template (by clicking on Deployments under destination resource group) and add/remove items you need or don't need.