Two years ago I was forced to move my blog out of my own co-located server due to hardware failure. At the time moving to Microsoft Azure cloud made all the sense. Today, I'm not running from Azure anymore.
At the point, I had been working closely with AWS for serveral years, so going there didn't make any sense from learning perspective. As I wanted to properly learn Azure, I went there with my hobby.
Regret is a strong word. I don't regret that decision, but almost do. For those two years I was struggling with performance. PostgreSQL DB was running as a service (Azure Database for PostgreSQL), so it didn't eat those precious resources from my virtual machine. My VM was a DS1 v2, so it was the obvious bottleneck. Going for a bigger one for a hobby in Azure didn't make any sense costwise.
Personally those years helped a lot. I've been working with Azure projects over the recent year and even gained certification for that. The previous experience gained from running my blog, obviously, was beneficial. All that being said, it's time to move on.
My new hosting provider is a small Finnish one providing affordable VMs packing reasonable punch for buck. I still have IPv6 and all the fancy stuff. At the time of writing, I don't have HTTP/2, but I'm working with that. The most important thing is: there is more power. The blog response times are much better now.
If you feel something is off, please drop me a comment!
