<rant>
So what did I learn this week?

In short, don’t use Microsoft Azure Web Service to host your applications!

That’s right, don’t do it.

I had a client with a PHP application that was running on another host. He wanted to put everything under the Microsoft Umbrella and so we migrated the app. We’ve been very happy overall with the service for about 2 years and saw a nice boost in performance too (but that is more because the switched away from using shared hosting though).

So why am I advising you stay away from it then?

Last Friday (maybe Thursday night), out of nowhere, Microsoft (it sure wasn’t us) changed the Web Service PHP version and instantly broke the application. No one appears to have been notified of said change, it was just done!

I said, no big deal, I’ll just revert things and everything will fall back into place and we can take some time to upgrade on a test server and redeploy at a later date. Nope, there was no option to revert versions anymore! We used to have various PHP versions that we could switch between, but no more, that capability was now gone?!

Add to that the fact that through this mess, I’ve discovered that Azure web services will no longer support PHP on Windows instances in October, so now we have to create a Linux instance, migrate everything again, test, …

I could go on, there’s more to the story regarding support… (or the lack thereof), but there’s simply no point in wasting anymore time on this mess.

Never in all my years of hosting websites, web applications with a variety of hosting companies have I had a single instance of a unilateral change done in this manner!  Nor have I ever had such poor support!

 

So what have I done, I’ve spent a week performing updates and fixing glitches to what was a perfectly stable application.

My client is looking to walk away from it all. Thanks to Microsoft I will probably loose my biggest client, one I’ve built up an excellent relationship over a 8-10 year period, Microsoft destroyed in one instance.

Thank you Microsoft!

So stick with your current host, at least they don’t go around unilaterally changing configurations and breaking mission critical business applications, and you can actually call them or get replies to e-mails for proper support!

Be Forewarned!
</rant>