Since this is a blog for new experiences, I should probably talk about setting up this website. I have had experience setting up a website before, but it was self hosted. That was cheap, but a nightmare to setup. This time around I used Microsoft Azure to host the site, but like last time, I used Go-Daddy to get my domain name. If you couldn’t tell the site is a WordPress site. I’ve never been a big fan of these types of sites, but you can’t argue with the results. They are quick to setup and look beautiful.  They also have so many themes, plugins, and options that I still feel like I don’t know half of them. Getting the WordPress part of the site setup was the most fun and the easiest. Getting Azure and Go-Daddy to work together took awhile, but I figured it out. The hardest part was getting the site to appear on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. I had to install some plugins and learn about how search engines index sites. Setting up the sitemap file was important, but ultimately this link and this one provided the instant results I was looking for.

I do have some concerns on cost however. I have Azure’s Pay as You Go plan, so if my site gets lots of traffic then I am in trouble. I would like some piece of mind by setting a price limit. This option exists on Azure but not for the Pay as You Go plan, as far as I can tell. I’d like to be able to slow or shutdown the site if a certain amount is surpassed, but sadly I cannot. The Go-Daddy price does not concern me, it was more upfront cost, but cheap in the long run.

Overall this process was fun and look forward to doing it again in the future.