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Hi guy a bit of strange one.
I have started working with a developer/designer who builds websites for my clients. I pay him a fee for the website and then he charges me a monthly fee for the hosting/maintenance.
Now we charge the customer £15/month for the hosting.
My developer/designer has asked for £7.50/month for hosting + a 1 off fee of £5 to add the website to his server claiming it costs him £5 for every website he adds to the server.
My question is does it cost him £5 extra for every website he adds to the the server or not? He hosts the websites using Azure cloud.
I always thought you paid for the web server and you could then upload as many website as you like as long as it does not go over your bandwidth or free space.
Assuming you're using Azure Web Apps as you have stated in your description, you would pay per App Service Plan. Of course this may not be the case, and your hoster may have additional costs which he may be passing on to you.
In specific cases, if you're hosting multiple web sites on a set amount of servers, the cost doesn't increase for each app, however there will be a degradation in performance, and at some point you will obviously have to increase the amount of servers the apps are hosted on. There may be additional costs for other resources as well.
Specifically for Azure Web Apps an App Service Plan is a mapping from sites to servers. So you can have a large amount of small apps running on a couple of servers, or a small amount of large apps running on the same couple of servers. Provided that your App Service Plan is the same SKU and there are the same amount of instances in each, these will be the same cost.
That's why the billing page: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-service/plans/ has unlimited for the number of web apps. So to answer your question (if you are indeed using web apps), you will get billed for one App Service Plan (which may contain multiple servers) regardless of the number of apps you have in it, since regardless of the number of apps, you'll be using the same amount of servers.
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I'm interested in using Azure as a PaaS solution to host a Node Js app that I'll be developing in the few coming months. I've done a fair bit of research on the pricing models and tiers so I sort of have a grasp on that, however, I'm not sure how to accurately spec my server requirements. When looking at pure CPU, Memory and Storage specifications between the Basic, Standard and Premium plans they all look similar, with the exception of storage I suppose.
The application I intend to build will primarily perform CRUD based actions. It will not host large images/videos and static files will be used in JS libraries or small images for theming (icons, logos etc I'm hoping there's a CDN). I anticipate no more than 1000 web page requests per day and the AppService is only intended to serve as a WebApi and Web Server, I intend to host the DB on Mlab.
I'm looking for an option that will give me reasonable page load and server response times (1-2secs). The app service also needs support for SSL, is that something I need to get from Microsoft or I can purchase and apply elsewhere.
Finally, I'd love to be able to test and dev on Azure, as from my experience it is better to do so on an architecture that matches your production. Is there any low cost Dev/Test server options that I can use instead of using the production service (which I anticipate will exceed my test performance requirements and would also cost more)?
While the CPU, memory, and storage options may look similar between the plans, the VM underneath and the additional features are not.
For plans:
Shared/Free are plans where you share a VM with other users. You have
quotas for how much of the VMs resources you are allowed to use, and
if you go over them the site will be shut down until the quota
resets. This is fine for dev/test environments, but can be risky for
production as a traffic spike can cause your site to be turned off
temporarily.
Basic plans give you a dedicated VM for your app, so there are no
quotas and thus removes the risk of having your site shut off it gets
too popular.
Standard adds autoscaling (the ability to increase and decrease resources based on usage metrics) and SSL.
Premium is similar to Standard, but the underlying VM is running on better hardware.
The Shared plan and higher (basically anything but free) offers load balancing and custom domains. You can purchase a domain within your Azure account or bring your own.
The default yourwebsite.azurewebsites.net is protected by the azurewebsites.net SSL cert. However, if you use a custom domain and need SSL support, then you need to be on a Standard plan or higher. As with domains, you can purchase one through Azure or bring your own.
You can put a CDN of your own choosing in front of your Azure App Service, or you can use Azure's CDN. It is not included in the App Service plan.
For production with a custom domain and SSL, you are looking at one of the Standard plans.
For dev/test there are a couple ways you could go. If your dev server doesn't use any of the extra features like custom domains, you can scale the plan up and down as you please. That means you can scale up to the matching plan for final testing of a release, but leave it in a lower tier the majority of the time.
The second option is to use deployment slots to create your dev site on the same VM as your prod site. You need to be on a Standard plan or higher to use this feature, and it comes with some added benefits. Particularly that you can swap which code is in production or funnel some of your traffic to a staging slot before swapping new code into production.
I am talking about big companies, like ebay, Amazon. Do they host their application servers on Virtual Machine instances like EC2? Or they are still using physical servers? Is there a trend to move from physical servers to VMs because VMs are cost-effective and scalable?
Thanks!
Update: I found an article here: http://gigaom.com/2012/04/09/why-instagram-is-likely-moving-on-from-amazons-cloud/
Instagram was building on virtual infrastruture before, but its owner FB might be considering to move away from AWS.
But the question still remains: Are the applicaiton still running on virtualized OSes or on native OSes?
HostCabi.net surveys the top 500 hosting providers which accounts for the top 100,000 websites excluding the actual top 500 which are surveyed in the top 500 websites including who hosts them.
I'm not aware of a specific table that is going to show you what technology each hosting company provides, for that you would have to check on the website of the hosting company to see what service they offer.
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I am looking to move an existing application to the cloud. Its a ASP.Net application talking to a sql server database.
As far as I can see, I have 2 choices:
Web and Worker Role Instances and Windows Virtual machines.
The price for Web and Worker Role Instances is greater than Windows Virtual machines - I am unsure why this is?
Why would I want to use Web and Worker Role Instances over a Windows virtual machine?
Virtual Machines is currently in Preview. As such, operating costs are discounted. See here for the Preview vs. GA (General Availability) pricing. You'll see that, during Preview, Virtual Machines run $0.08 / core / hour, vs. $0.115 / hour in GA. This explains the lower cost vs. Cloud Service web/worker roles (which are in GA and not in Preview).
As far as reasons for using Web/Worker over Virtual Machines, that has probably been answered elsewhere (but worthy of a separate question nevertheless).
Web and Worker Roles come under the Platform as a Service (PaaS) umbrella whereas Azure Virtual Machines (Currently in Preview) offer an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution. Web and Worker Roles provide a platform you can deploy your .NET application to, directly from your development environment. Web and Worker Roles automatically handle the provisioning of IIS, opening of endpoints and the load-balancing of your application across multiple instances.
Virtual Machines on the other hand provide a bare bones Server 2008 system you can configure to meet your requirements. A VM is preferable if you need to run custom applications that aren't easily deployable within IIS. But effectively you can do what you want with a VM as you are paying for the infrastructure, the flip side of that is your dealing with all the configuration overhead that comes with managing infrastructure.
If you're running a web application I would use a Web Role, it may be more expensive than a VM but there's a great deal going on under the covers that abstract away many of the problems of developing, deploying, maintaining and scaling a web application. Also if you need a 'High Availability' solution with automated Fail over, a web-role with two instances comes with a 99.95% SLA.
I'm developing a Web API and will host it at Windows Azure. What should I take into consideration to decide where to deploy it? As far as I know it can be deployed as a Website or as a Cloud Service. Would love to know the pros and cons you guys see.
Thanks!
Both Cloud Services and Windows Azure Web Sites are fine hosts for an ASP.NET Web API.
I agree with #SLaks - depends on how much control you want.
Use Cloud Service for maximum control (including control over performance characteristics and (for APIs that need this) ability to scale out). Web Sites for speed of deployment (seconds rather than minutes) and cost (might be free, depending on your scaling needs).
With a Web Site, your largest VM size is Large. With a Cloud Service, it can go to XL (twice the specs of a Large).
With a Web Site, you can have up to three VM instances in Reserved Mode. With a Cloud Service, there is no hard limit (though you may need to call support to exceed 20 cores in a standard account).
With a Web Site, you have no control over IIS. With a Cloud Service, you do, so you can do things like use the Warm-up Module in IIS and tweak the recycle settings (these both help improve latency in certain scenarios).
More on Scaling Web Sites: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/services/web-sites/how-to-scale-websites/
In summary, from least-to-most control, you really have: Web Sites Shared Instances (high density mode, little control, limited scale, free) => Reserved Mode (little control, better scale, more predictable (b/c no tenants you don't know about), costs money, low knowledge) => Cloud Service (max control over IIS, costs money, more knowledge needed around Cloud Services).
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I am doing some preliminary research on Windows Azure. The idea is to move 200+ ASP classic websites to Windows Azure. I am wondering if this is possible and feasible? Can I host that many websites on a single VM? Also note that each website needs to have its own set of email addresses.
There's absolutely no reason why you couldn't host all those sites on Azure VM (assuming you're talking about the preview Virtual Machine functionality). You get your own isolated machine, with its own IIS and IP. What you put on it is up to you, but it's no different than getting a VPS from any other company (rackspace etc.).
Obviously this is assuming that your sites are not very resource heavy and the memory etc. you get with different VM sizes can support the use.
Marek's answer isn't wrong, but please don't use "Virtual Machines" for this, and instead use Cloud Services (specifically, a web role). A web role lets you deploy just your code (in this case: websites) without having to mess with managing a full VM.
In short, PaaS is better than IaaS, as long as your app fits the model (which IIS-based websites do in Windows Azure).
I don't know what "each website needs to have its own set of email addresses" means or how it relates.