It’s super easy to launch a clean WordPress site using a Bitnami image on Microsoft Azure. A 1-core, 1GB RAM virtual machine is more than enough to handle early traffic.

The VM instance can be reserved, cutting costs by 65-70%, so I ended up paying less than $10/month for a multi-site WordPress instance with full control over the server. No DevOps experience needed.

For a real-world example, check out blog.hipa.ai it runs on this setup and loads fast even under traffic spikes.