Is 2019 the Year of Azure for Microsoft? It is for OnMSFT.com!

3 min. read

Published onJanuary 1, 2019

published onJanuary 1, 2019

Share this article

Read our disclosure page to find out how can you help Windows Report sustain the editorial teamRead more

Happy New Year everyone! Hope all of you are enjoying all that the new year brings. For us here at OnMSFT.com, that’s quite a bit, as it turns out.

First, a bit of backstory: WinBeta.org, our predecessor until we changed our name some two years ago, for most of its tenure, and most of OnMSFT’s, was run by our Editor Emeritus Ron, who was passionate about both Microsoft and this site. In the past year or so, though, his available time to devote to OnMSFT diminished, and a few months ago he turned the reins over to me. In that time, though, the site didn’t get the attention it needed, and market forces have changed the landscape for consumer-centric Microsoft blogs.

So for the past month or so I’ve been preparing a cleanup of the site, including the WordPress code it runs on, the database that runs everything, and the services we use to get the results of our Microsoft enthusiasm out to you. Last night, I flipped the switch and moved our site from Rackspace, a premium host provider that was maybe a bit too rich for our needs, to a Virtual Machine running on Azure. As it turns out, the Azure VM boasts about the same specs as our old host, for about half the cost. I’ll be writing some more about Azure and the little guy as we move forward, but for now, it’s enough to say that we’re eating the dogfood.

Our next project will be to complete a new WordPress theme, as you may notice there are a few immediate changes, but most of the work was done on the back end to fix some problems, clean up some code, and make a new theme possible. You can think of this as a placeholder for now: we’ve stripped down the car, cut out the rust, sanded things down, and applied a coat of primer. A shiny new paint job is in the works, but all that prep work had to be done first, and here we are.

Luckily, we were able to accomplish this over the holiday break, when Redmond becomes a ghost town, and our readers spend more time setting up their new Surface or their new Xbox than they do reading about what’s coming next. But as soon as next week with CES, the news cycle is going to be ramping up again, and we can’t wait! It is going to be a big year for Microsoft, and by this time next year we’ll know a lot more about HoloLens, about Surface, about Windows and Cortana and Edge and, yes, about Azure.

Thanks for reading OnMSFT.com. Please be patient over the next couple of days as I work through some known issues, but feel free to leave a comment below on what you see, and especially what you’d like to see.

Happy New Year!

kip

Kip Kniskern

User forum

0 messages

Sort by:LatestOldestMost Votes

Comment*

Name*

Email*

Commenting as.Not you?

Save information for future comments

Comment

Kip Kniskern

With KB5043178 to Release Preview Channel, Microsoft advises Windows 11 users to plug in when the battery is low#

Copilot in Outlook will generate personalized themes for you to customize the app#

Microsoft will raise the price of its 365 Suite to include AI capabilities#

Death Stranding Director’s Cut is now Xbox X|S at a huge discount#

Outlook will let users create custom account icons so they can tell their accounts apart easier#

Is 2019 the Year of Azure for Microsoft? It is for OnMSFT.com!#

With KB5043178 to Release Preview Channel, Microsoft advises Windows 11 users to plug in when the battery is low

Copilot in Outlook will generate personalized themes for you to customize the app

Microsoft will raise the price of its 365 Suite to include AI capabilities

Death Stranding Director’s Cut is now Xbox X|S at a huge discount

Outlook will let users create custom account icons so they can tell their accounts apart easier

Is 2019 the Year of Azure for Microsoft? It is for OnMSFT.com!