As traffic on this web site has increased, the memory usage on Azure Web Sites has been creeping up, overwhelming the quotas on my Shared plan. A Shared Instance of Azure Web Sites is allocated 512 MB of “memory usage” per hour which can be overwhelmed quickly if you get a reasonable amount of traffic.
One simple way to increase your quota is to scale up the number of instances – each new instance also increases your quota. In my current configuration, www.microsofttrends.com runs on 2 shared instances which provides me a quota of 1024 MB / hour. I have scaled this up to 3 instances when there has been noticeably higher traffic.
One of the ways I have found to keep this usage contained is a pretty simple one – I switched my comments form to Disqus. I was receiving approximately 500-1000 comments a day that were all spam which I’m convinced was increasing the load on my web site by at least 50-100%. Switching to Disqus has killed the spam entirely and more importantly completely offloads comments to another service.
Turning on Disqus is pretty easy in WordPress – just sign up for an account and then install the disqus plugin and it will replace your default WordPress comment form.
