How to setup a rock solid VM on Windows Azure for your WordPress blogs

Windows Azure is offering Extra Small Virtual Machines (1 vCPU, 768 MB RAM) at $9/mo, free for first 3 months. Yes, you read it right. You can get a Windows VMs at $9 (until May 31st) and Linux VMs at $15, at the same rate as Amazon Micro Instance, which is free for first year (boo Microsoft!). However, MSDN Ultimate subscribers get 1500h worth of Small VM hours for free! It is a good time to grab a VM or two and setup your own servers, where you can host your own blog and showcase your awesome open source projects. VMs are your own mini server, where you get full remote desktop access and do whatever you like. You don’t have to be limited to a web based control panel. It’s your own baby server on the cloud, fully scalable and redundant.