Microsoft Azure is nice, but I’m beginning to doubt it. I found that the server hosting Nanohawk.com was unresponsive again. My fault for not dealing with it sooner. I had gotten an alert from Pingdom a few days ago, but thought it was an anomoly.
It refused to restart via the portal. I wound up having to stop the server and then start it again. That’s fine, but it changed my IP which required an update to DNS after trying to figure out why I could not load the webpage or get SSH to respond. It would have been nice if Azure had warned me I was going to lose the IP address. I would not have wasted 15 minutes trying to figure out why the machine wasn’t responsive despite the console indications that it should have been.
Amazon Web Services is looking very interesting. I’m already there for backup and DNS management. Instances are the same price. Amazon has great documentation. Microsoft has documentation written by marketing that rarely contains what I’m looking for.