WordPress on Azure with Cleardb solution

  • Jay_wpo

    (@jay_wpo)


    10 years ago

    I am self hosting wordpress on Azure. I have some confusion about exactly what is stored and where.

    I understand that there are two storage locations that my site is using – Azure and Cleardb. I don’t understand the following.

    1. All the posts, the content like images, where are they stored? Are they on Azure or Cleardb?

    2. If the content is stored on Azure, why was I asked to create an account with cleardb when I created a new wordpress site via Azure?

    3. Previously, I was using the free version of Cleardb which only gives me 20 MB of storage. I am pretty sure that my site has more than 500 MB of images alone. Obviously, the images aren’t store on cleardb and yet, something happened last month. The traffic to my site increased, and cleardb asked me upgrade for the site went offline. I have since upgraded to a 1 GB plan.

    4. I am asking all these question to figure out what should I be backing up? The Azure storage or cleardb storage or both?

    Do let me know if you need any more information and I will be happy to provide. I hope I have been descriptive enough with this question.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • imerio

    (@imerio)

    Hi Jay_wpo,
    All the posts, except images, are stored on the database (Cleardb in your case), together with comments, links, see https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Database_Description
    The images, together with the WordPress installation, are stored on the Web Server (Azure in your case).
    To do a useful backup you must backup both.

    Thread Starter Jay_wpo

    (@jay_wpo)

    First up, that response clarifies so many things. Thank you, a lot!

    One follow up questions.

    When you say images, does that mean all media? If I upload videos, audio and any other media, will they all be stored on Azure?

    imerio

    (@imerio)

    Yes, all kind of media are stored on the Web Server.

    Hello Jay:
    Hope you get this post. I too have WordPress hosted on Azure with a ClearDB back-end which is filling up. ClearDB tells me there is no UPGRADE path to upsize my database, and that I need to create a new one and port everything over.
    Questions:
    How do I accomplish this? Can I do a backup and restore in ClearDB? If so how? Other options?
    Second, where is the connection string in WordPress that points to my ClearDB database? I don’t see anything in the Dashboard Settings. Is it buried in a file somewhere?

    Thanks in advance.

    Thread Starter Jay_wpo

    (@jay_wpo)

    Hi Todd,

    First up, i am surprised cleardb won’t allow you to upgrade the plan ?? that’s…odd.

    Second, you can use any of back up plugins and back up your entire site to an online storage such as dropbox. Once the back up I done, you can restore the backup after creating a new WordPress site with the cleardb plan. That’s what I would do.

    About the connection string, I am afraid I don’t know anything about that. I am not much of a database developer.

    I paid extra and setup clearDB to backup my wordpress website running on Azure.

    I added a new domain name in the wp-admin console. It ended up breaking everything i.e., I couldn’t logon to the wp-admin portal. The change also resulted in my theme being deactivated. I tried a restore from cleardb but it doesn’t help in this scenario.

    It looks like I’ll have to start over from scratch. Luckily, I exported a backup of my wordpress posts and pages to dropbox. All I’ve lost is my images, theme and plug-ins. An the time it will take me to reconfigure from scratch. I’m disappointed that I’m paying extra for clearDB and it’s an incomplete solution.

    fyi, this is the response I received from clearDB:

    You’ll need to contact Azure support about this

    Cashton Coleman on 7/21/2015 10:38PM wrote

    Hi there,

    Thanks for contacting us. The error that you received is not a MySQL specific error, and thus we are unable to assist with this issue. You may want to contact your local WordPress administrator/developers, or reach out to Azure support about this.

    Best regards,
    Cashton

    Back to Jay_wpo’s original post question about what is stored and where:
    Yes, media content for the Azure web site is stored on the Azure servers, BUT, and I found this out by poking around, if you install one of any several WP plugins for ‘photo gallery’ stuff, the plugin creates and interfaces with several tables in the ClearDB database. The inclusion of photos in my gallery, for me, is what caused my ClearDB database to get bloated beyond the 20 Meg limit.

    On a side note, after having my site crash and burn, and after re-creating it from backups because restore to a larger ClearDB database hosed everything up, ClearDB NOW (just like two weeks after my episode) supports in-place upgrade from free (Mercury) plan to larger, paid, database capacity. Go figure :/

    OH, and not all the plugins work with an Azure SQL database back-end, even if you install the database abstraction layer plugin. I know because I tried, asked some plugin authors and that is what they told me.

    Kevin: I’m willing to bet it was the inclusion of another domain that caused the problems for you.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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