The Build Log is the running diary of building Tygart Media’s systems in public — real bills, real failures, real fixes. Written by Will Tygart with Claude, the AI employee doing most of the typing. This is entry 001.
Yesterday morning I told my AI, more or less out loud while making coffee: “I’m thinking of hosting a site on Azure so I can figure out how to use Microsoft cloud. How much of a lift is that?” About thirty-six hours later, the site you are reading is live on Azure with a TLS certificate, two reference pages that update themselves, a Bing Webmaster Tools account, and an editorial staff that worked its first night shift while I slept. This post is the honest log of how that happened, including the parts that went sideways.
The idea: two clouds, two sites
I already run a publishing operation at tygartmedia.com — WordPress on Google Cloud, heavily automated, with most of its search traffic coming from Bing and AI answer engines. The new idea was a deliberate split: the Google site keeps covering what it covers, and this site — tygart.media — becomes the Microsoft lane, hosted on Microsoft’s own cloud, writing about Microsoft’s own ecosystem, built in public. Each site wears a “Powered by” badge for its own stack. The build itself becomes the first content. You are reading that theory working.
What the build actually looked like
The account (30 minutes, $0). Azure free account, $200 credit, 30 days. First thing my AI created was not a server — it was a budget alert at $25, $40, and $50. If you take one thing from this post: create the budget alert before the first resource. Azure surprise bills are a genre of internet horror story, and we will get to one.
The first wall (quota). Brand-new Azure subscriptions have zero compute quota in some regions. Our web server refused to exist in West US 2. Fix: try West US 3, which took it. Wrinkle: the MySQL database had already provisioned in West US 2, and West US 3 refused to create one (capacity errors, twice). So this site runs its web tier in Arizona and its database in Washington. For a cached content site, the cross-state hop is fine. It is also exactly the kind of compromise no tutorial mentions.
The bill. App Service B1 plan, about $13 a month. MySQL Flexible Server burstable, about $13 a month. TLS certificates, $0 (Azure managed certs are free now). Total run rate: roughly $26 a month, covered by credit until July.
The plot twist: the domain was in my wife’s GoDaddy account
I went to point the domain at the new server and discovered I could not, because tygart.media was not in my GoDaddy account. A dig through my own email revealed I had already discovered this once before and forgotten: the domain lives in my wife Stefani’s account. So the DNS handoff became a family project — my AI drafted her an email with the three exact records, mobile instructions, the likely error messages, and a “just reply go-ahead and we’ll do it” escape hatch. She switched the records that evening and they propagated perfectly on the first try. Lesson: your domain registrar situation is part of your infrastructure. Audit it before launch day.
Publishing a homepage by writing SQL through a firewall
The WordPress REST API needs an application password, which needs admin access, which we had not set up yet. Rather than click around, my AI opened a temporary firewall rule on the database scoped to one IP address, wrote the homepage directly into MySQL as SQL, restarted the app, verified the page rendered, and closed the firewall — total exposure, a few minutes. Is that the textbook way to publish a homepage? No. Did it work on the first try at nine at night? Yes. (We have since done it properly: a one-shot plugin bootstrapped a real API credential and then neutralized itself.)
What this site is for: the desks
The research that picked this site’s first two pages found something I did not expect. Microsoft sells at least seven different products named “Copilot” under four different billing models, has changed pricing eight times in six months, and nobody on the internet maintains one current page covering all of them. Separately: Anthropic’s Claude models went live on Microsoft Foundry — and a documented billing trap around marketplace models has produced surprise bills up to five figures and a petition to Satya Nadella, with plenty of outrage coverage and zero practical guides.
So those are the first two assets: the Copilot Pricing Index and Claude on Azure (Foundry). Each is maintained by a “desk” — a scheduled AI task that re-verifies every figure against primary sources several times a week, updates the page in place, and logs every change. The desks run on a mid-tier model because checking prices against sources is procedure, not genius. Above them sits an editor-in-chief on the strongest model we have, auditing every edit the desks make against the sources they claim — twice a day. If a desk changes a price without a traceable source, the editor reverts it and flags me.
The first night shift
Last night, while I slept: the Tacoma weather desk on our sister site verified its data against the National Weather Service at 3:04 a.m. Three more desks ran between 4 and 5:30. The lead watchdog for a client checked a Slack channel at 5:31 on the big model, because a missed lead costs more than tokens — that one decision, which work deserves the expensive model and which does not, turned out to be the most important cost lesson of the week. The editor clocked in at 6:04. Nobody woke me up, which is the entire point.
What broke
In the spirit of honest logs: my laptop keyboard half-died mid-build (a Windows update is the prime suspect), so most of this build was voice-dictated — my AI spent two days translating “budo daddy” into GoDaddy and “Tiger Media” into Tygart Media. A focus-stealing desktop app ate a verification click at the worst moment. And the first version of this site’s homepage looked like a dark postcard floating on a white wall until we fixed the page background. None of it was fatal. All of it is normal. Build logs that skip this part are advertising.
Next
The desks run their first scheduled week. Bing Webmaster Tools starts reporting in about 48 hours. And entry 002 will probably be about what the desks got wrong in week one and what the editor caught — because the interesting part of automation is never the launch, it is the second week.
Stack, for the curious: Azure App Service + MySQL Flexible Server, WordPress, two in-house plugins (about forty lines total — IndexNow auto-submission, Bing verification, and the dark theme), Claude doing the building, Notion as the system of record, and a human making the calls. Questions or corrections: this page will be fixed within days, like everything else here.
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