Just a quick question about the windows azure trial.
If i get the windows azure 90 day trial
will it show on my debit card?
could i be charged at all, i heard they put a spending limit on all trial accounts, however can you still be charged at all, even if you dont take the spending limit off?
the larger the vm you make (small to large for example) the shorter
it will run as it uses more compute hours?
thanks.
You should provide credit card, but won't be charged, so it won't show in statement.
If you excess you limit, they just will disable your account, but won't charge anyway.
Not sure about third question.
You will need to provide a credit card for verification purposes, but you won't be charged unless you explicitly switch to pay-as-you-go. And yes, the larger VM you created the quicker it will use up the free trial credit. The current trial gives you $200 or 30 days, whichever you hit first.
Related
My problem:
Currently in my project it's required to keep a payment in an uncaptured state for more than 7 days which is the maximum for stripe.
What I came up with atm:
I see that it can be done by remembering customer's card (using stripe's api for this of course), creating an uncaptured payment, refunding it when the 7-day period comes to an end and creating it again until we choose to finally capture it.
I guess this 'hack' will be used only once per a payment as usually we have to hold the payment for about 10 days.
Questions:
Are there any pitfalls besides that a customer will see a second payment?
Any other ways to handle this?
Thanks in advance :)
So we ended up sticking to this method described in the question, but #korben's point is true, it's still hard to handle because even if a bank can release the funds fast, we still don't know when exactly does it happen as stripe can't inform us when the customer actually got his money back whether it's two minutes or two days.
It still works for us, because the payment is not that big and happens in person, so customers can choose whether they want to give a deposit in cash or use this method which seems more comfortable.
For context (because I was recently solving this problem and came across this thread), a number of websites recommend if you have a payment that wasn't captured within seven days, then cancel the order and create a new one. For example, Shopify recommends this and the authorization expiry date is displayed on the Orders page.
However, for all of the reasons #korben mentioned, it's best practise to avoid holding authorizations for over 7 days. Additional fees are also charged when collecting charges after the standard authorization period (depending on the issuing bank of a credit card).
I signed up for a 30 day Azure trial 3 days ago. I have 2 vms. Today, I have 2 messages popping up in my Management Portal.
Your Free Trial expires in 25 day(s). Click here to upgrade now.
Based on your usage history ($21.52/day), you might use your remaining credit in about 3 days.
25 days left $67 credit remaining
I feel like I cut the "speed-up countdown" wire on a time bomb in an 80's movie.
I'd like to fully evaluate Azure and I'm just getting started. Clearly I missed something along the way that is preventing me from getting the full trial period.
Microsoft Support just gives me Azure's sales phone number.
Does someone know what I need to do to get a trial extension and stop the countdown from going too fast.
Thanks!
There isn't a way to extend the trial period. If you have disable the spending limit, you account would operate without any problem, but yet, you would start incurring cost.
These are the ways you cut down costs
Reduce the size of isntance - say small ( A1 )
Recduce the instance count
At any point in time if you are not using your instance, you can stop the instance and you cost near ZERO cost during that time.
If you have MSDN Subscription or BizSpark Subscription would would get $150 everymonth as credits
I have noticed that costs can be quickly used if you keep dropping and creating the database for testing purposes on azure, best to use existing database
I apologize if this is in the correct StackExchange site. I couldn't find a place that seemed perfectly suited for this question. My question is as follows..
Being a Microsoft BizSpark member I have access to free Azure hosting. The hosting provided is 1,500 hours a month of small instances free (this equals out to 2 small instances running 24 hours a day for a full month). The details of the offer go on to state "You can run 2 Small instances full-time or other sizes at their equivalent ratios."
Does this mean I can run one Medium instance for 24 hours a day for a month, for free? If you look at the pricing, a Medium instance is exactly twice as much as a small.
Does anyone have any experience with this that can chime in? Many thanks in advance!
Yes, I know, I use BizSpark subscription and I have advised and follwoing couple of fellow ISV to use it. And yes, you are correct, the BizSpark gives you 1500 small instance hours, which is 1 full month of single Mednium sized instance. This is in terms of compute. But you know that if you run only one instance, you are not covered by the 99.95% SLA! The SLA only takes place when you have 2 or more instances per role!
There is a new trial offer available for windows Azure which gives you 25 hours of small computing instance time a month and other things like 1 GB SQL Azure and more. See link below: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/popup/popup.aspx?lang=en&locale=en-US&offer=MS-AZR-0001P
Now my question: Is there a way to prevent exceeding these limits? I only want to try and don't want to be billed.
I believe you don't need a credit card to use the 30 day pass - the one from here:
http://windowsazurepass.com/
as far as I know there is no automated way to have it turn it off before you get billed. You will need to just be very careful about monitoring your usage manually.
For Doobi's suggestion, I believe you need a promo code to get the free 30 day trial. There is a MSDN blog post with the code MPR001 here.
I've developed a simple system using ASP.NET MVC and WCF for customers to register software and get a license key. I was thinking about using Windows Azure instead of a traditional web hosting because it seems easy to use. I'd only need one SQL database and one small VM, but I'm confused about the billing.
Does the billing only charge as people actually use it, or would I pay the fee for each CPU every hour of everyday for the whole month because that was what was available to users? So for one single cpu VM at $0.12 an hour in a 30 day month I'd pay $86.4? Or would I pay less if no one used it? Then another $9.99 for an up to 1GB database, so for my needs I'd basically pay $96.39 a month?
That seems expensive for basic web hosting, but if it's easier for someone with little hosting experience to set up and maintain as well as making it easy to expand if I suddenly got a lot of traffic then it would certainly be worth it to me.
EDIT: I think I found the answer here: Getting started with Windows Azure
You're correct regarding the $0.12 / hour: you're billed based on resources consumed (meaning virtual machine instances), whether you're running at 0% cpu or 100% cpu.
While it might seem expensive compared to your average shared-hosting provider, consider that you're getting health monitoring, failover, SLA (if you have 2 or more instances) upgrade domains, etc.
I have two blog posts that go deeper into Compute Instance billing that you might find beneficial:
Part 1: The True Cost of Web and Worker Roles
Part 2: Staging and Compute-Hour Metering
I hope this helps...
The rule for billing is quite simple: if you look at the protal, there are the "gray" or "blue" boxes showing for a deployment.
If the box is gray, you are OK. If the box is blue, a bill is due.
This means that charges for every hour will be made whenever the box is blue, that is: once a deployment has been done, whether it's stopped or running.
Now you have a new feature in windows azure called WebSites. Deploying a website which have only a small amount of visits. It is simply 'free'. This is light weight website running in a shared environment.
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/ -> Check for websites.