Update: I moved off it again after a year. I found the additional level of indirection through Azure and perf not great compared to the cost. I now use a dedicated wordpress hoster.
I was finally fed up with the default Azure wordpress set up that uses a MYSQL database so I decided to switch to Project Nami. This is an open source spin off (fork) of WordPress that completly rewrote the data access layer to use SQL. Very cool.
To get started just go here http://projectnami.org/download/ and click “Deploy to Azure”, this will automatically deploy project nami to your Azure account. Next I moved my blog over following this blog post: http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-properly-move-your-blog-from-wordpress-com-to-wordpress-org/.
Last I pointed my domains to the new Azure portal and done 
. I also changed the theme while I was at it (let me know what you think ..)
I hope this new effort will also make sure i’ll write more posts here soon, I have two on the list already.
Good to hear that not only we had many problems with the Azure-Wordpress-MySQL Hosting, interesting new alternative that you show here.
I moved 3 customer projects running WordPress on Azure standard offering away for performance, uptime and support issues. The support forums for the WebApp offering from Microsoft were full of complaints. Seems this did not get better.
hmm so far everything looks to work out great but i’ll keep an eye out. What were the issue you are facing?
a mix of the following:
– sites been slow
– sites went offline multiple times without being able to find out what happened, support was slow or non-existent.
one site was on a free plan / bizspark plan, the others were bigger sites running in paid accounts (around 100 USD/month), but if you want qualified support you have to pay an extra monthly fee.
I had none of this issues running on any classic hosting companies.
After significant effort I came to the conclusion that this project is only good for very basic wordpress installs. It fails on the most simple plugins like revolution slider and dont even think about bbforums or buddy press at one point it crashed the entire site after installing one of those plugins. .
I had the same experience, works well for simple site but support from most plugins is non-existent. Meaning it fails to support most wordpress installs.
Now I have to install VM’s to host WordPress in Azure because Web-Apps are extremely slow for WordPress.
Try Docker with containers for mysql and wordpress. I have found it to be blazing fast, and its only one vm. https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/tree/master/docker-wordpress-mysql