Case Study: Microsoft Corporation achieves 75% hosting-cost savings and 99.999% uptime with Microsoft Azure

WordPress on Azure: The “Awesome” Choice Saves Microsoft 75 Percent of Hosting Costs

Microsoft’s corporate blogs had become a primary channel for major product announcements (one Office post drew over two million page views) but were hampered by unreliable third‑party hosting, frequent maintenance outages, inflexible access, high six‑figure fees, and marketing managers spending ~30% of their time on site administration. Traffic spikes of 500% or more made reliability and fast scaling essential.

Microsoft standardized on WordPress hosted on Azure Websites, using paired East/West datacenters, Azure Traffic Manager, and autoscaling to provide failover and on‑demand capacity. The move delivered five‑nines (99.999%) uptime, reclaimed admins’ time for content and feature work, cut hosting costs by as much as 75% (most units saving ≥50%), and made collaboration, testing, and rapid feature rollout much easier.

Microsoft Corporation

Ted Roduner

Senior Product Manager