Azure Pricing – too much for a little experiment
As many people may now be aware, Microsoft have officially announced the pricing for Windows Azure and the related services:
Windows Azure:
O Compute @ $0.12 / hour
O Storage @ $0.15 / GB / month stored
O Storage Transactions @ $0.01 / 10K
Now at first glance this doesn’t look too bad. However, as pointed out in a number of blog posts and forum threads (such as this one on the MSDN Azure Forum), the actual bare minimum cost of running a website comes to about $86.40 per month. This is for a site consisting of a single web role and a single backend worker role (regardless of amount of work actually performed by either) and could actually be $172.80 per month depending on whether a single web role and a single worker role count as two separate instances.
Now for the project I was working on this simply isn’t feasible, I was experimenting with an idea and wanted to try out the data driven site on Azure as it provided the means to have an ASP.NET powered site with background work being performed as required, on demand and on schedules. Unfortunately as it was an experiment there was no guaranteed income from it and so would very quickly have become a fairly expensive side-project to be running in my spare time.
Initially I had paused the project pending any further news about the Azure pricing, but as you can see from that forum thread some details are not 100% clear yet. As it has now been a couple of weeks I’ve decided to partially continue work on the project but am currently segregating my storage and other Azure related parts so that I can easily swap these out for an alternative platform without too much wasted work… We shall see!
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I think its more designed for a larger scale of project than yours. I actually dont think it is that much considering the cost of say dedicated hosting and other "current" alternatives. Having spent alot of time looking into server hosting recently on my current project say $100pm isnt very much.
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Yeah it seems like Azure is aimed more towards cloud based applications which require quick and seamless scalability. $100pm might not be bad for dedicated hosting but I guess it comes down to the fact that I don’t require the full set of features being offered, I was hoping for a more introductory/experiment-based pricing category.
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Unfortunately the only err "cloud engine" you can play with for free is Google AppSpot which is only Java and Python I think (but maybe you can use some web services fu dunno) – http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html#Free_Changes . Else Amazon S3 and Azure are great if you want to outsource your hardware and be super duper scalable or simply for a good content delivery network. It comes at a price but you don’t have to care about geographical distribution and loadbalancing, scaling, hardware maintenance and so on – it’s all done for you.
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And this is a random quote I found funny regarding Azure/Amazon S3, etc: Step right up, friends. Boy, have I got an offer for you. Have you got problems with scalability? Are you too incompetent to denormalize your data schema to optimize hot access paths? Do you write N-squared loops and blame poor execution speed on your runtime environment? Well, then step right up because I’ve got the solution for you. Microsoft Azure.
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lol
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