The Azure Issue I had (404 on Azure Websites)

A few weeks back some kind people following me on Twitter let me know that my site was down, returning the dreaded 404. As a result of that I learned a lot of new things about Azure, and I promised to let you all know what had happened and what the fix was. I’ve waited this long with this post as I wanted to get my questions answered by Azure support (I was contacted not by one, not two, not three, but six different people eager to help). I also wanted to make sure I didn’t do what looked like a rant post, as I really like Azure, and I believe that comes across all the posts I have on the topic and videos.

Nerd brag: Blogging this while flying over China on my way to Europe from Australia OMG this is soooo cool (and expensive)

The post covers what I should have done, and could have done, and where I feel like my expectations about expected behavior isn’t met.

Short version with key points:

I ran out of funds on my subscription after running a Hadoop instance. When you exceed your funds the sites mode is reverted to FREE from STANDARD or SHARED. There are no notifications that the site is down if you didn’t (totally my fault) set any alerts for that.

Here is a post where I explain how to setup Azure alerts.

There are no notifications about reaching funds limits, there is however a preview that let’s you setup alerts for funds changes.

Here is a blog post explaining how to sign up and set up.

When you change funds from limited to unlimited you will still see 0 SEK (or $), and the site mode *will not* be reverted to its original state.

Let’s talk about the problems with having the sites configuration changed without your knowledge. When the site mode is changed you have several problems: if you use your own domain name you can only do so in SHARED or STANDARD mode, also you will hit cap limits on storage and more.

There is no way of knowing that the site mode was changed, unless you notice that the cap limits have changed. Note: You can access a sites mode via PowerShell so you could set up a script to check for changes.

As I explained earlier once you supply enough funds the site will not go back to its original mode. Manually changing (only option) the sites mode from FREE to SHARED or STANDARD will *most likely* give you a new IP address, and you *might* loose some data (files) - according to support, and also according to people I know that had the same problem.

But, if you want the site up again, you have to change the mode. So make a backup (I FTP’ed in for a backup to be on the safe side), make the changes, and be prepared to do some cleaning up. Lucky for me, I was fine and site ran without any problems.

The Azure Issue I had (404 on Azure Websites)

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