My 3 months trial account Windows Azure has already been disabled in 3 weeks. How's that possible? I had nothing on my project, just a simple Asp.Net web page.
I don't think anybody knew my page and made constant requests.
I can't find a statistics section on Management Portal to check what was my traffic...etc.
Does anybody know where I can check my Hosted Service's statistics?
Thanks
The trial provides 750 compute hours monthly. Once you deploy your app, the meter is ticking. That is, as long as something is deployed, it's a metered resource. Whether consuming 0% or 100% cpu/network/memory, you pay hourly.
Now: If you deployed a single Small instance for your asp.net site, you shouldn't have consumed 750 hours in 3 weeks. Is it possible you deployed with Medium instances? Or deployed with 2 Small instances? Do you have more than one Role in your deployment (since each would have at least one instance)?
One bit of advice I give, when doing dev work: at the end of the day, when you're not actively working on a project, delete the deployment (you can always re-deploy to the same place later). This helps save tremendously on consumed hours.
You aren't charged based on access to a hosted service (i.e. compute instance). As long as you have something deployed there, you are charged. No one can ever go to it and it still costs you money.
At the portal, you have to delete whatever hosted services you have there in order to preserve credits. For example if you had up both a Production and a Staging instance, they would charge you compute hours for both. You have to actually delete the instances in order to conserve compute hours on your bill.
As for stats, the only way you can get access stats that I know of is by using the azure diagnostics features. They used to have a lot more detail on their bills (in / out transfers, etc) but the bills are a lot shorter now.
Related
I have an Azure Cloud Service published at Microsoft and it's draining all my credit!
Payment
Pay as you go
Service resource
Minimal resource, 1 SMALL web role and 1 SMALL worker role.
I knew Azure wasn't cheap, but this is just too much. Currently my monthly cost is just under 80 USD. The only person that use this service is me, noone else, and I barely use it. So the cost is just for the upkeep.
Is this normal?
70 bucks a month!?
How much does it cost for YOU?
What Microsoft support told me
I am afraid the Cloud Services has a fixed price, and I am not aware
how it could be lowered. Maybe you want to check on how the service
itself could be tweaked to get it working as per your needs. You may
want to go through the Community Forum for that.
Community = Stackoverflow, so here I am!
If I look at my Azure subscription page I can see that it's the:
CALCULATING HOURS - Europe, Western
That is taking all my hard earned money. My service also uses SQL, storage and cache but, if I understand it correctly, these are not the cause for my expensive bill.
Before I leave you to it I just want to say that I can't use a simple web app because of my requirements. I know web apps are super cheap, but in this case I must use a cloud service..
Thank you
Update
I found out I was using A1 (small) and not A0 (extra small). The instance type for a cloudservice can be set in the servicedefinition file.
It's sad that not even Microsoft themselves could inform me about this.
Web and worker roles are like dedicated VMs if they are on, they will cost you money.
You can do one of two things
1) Stop the machines when no one is using them ( say in the off business hours). I am not sure if this is possible to do or not in your case. But if it is possible, you can run a small script to start/ stop the roles. You can even do so via apps on your phone. For example - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/azure-management/id826446897?mt=8
2) Move to Azure Web Apps and Azure Web Jobs - Both these services are "multi-tenant" and cost much less and in fact offer a free tier. If and when you need to scale, you can always scale as your need
Hope this helps
Right now I have a small web app hosted on Azure services. Its 5 asp.net pages, 1 sql DB, and 2 scheduled jobs. Just through testing, I used 2 dollars of the 220 dollars credit they give you for signing up.
The problem I'm having is that there is no clear pricing guide for the pay-as-you-go service they offer. My live testing was very very lightweight (10 page hits, maybe 50db transactions, and 10 job runs) and its already cost 2 dollars. The breakdown available makes it clear where that money has gone (the scheduled jobs), but doesnt make it clear how much additional usage may cost me going forward.
Is there any area in azure, or any service anywhere, that can estimate the total cost under various loads? I am very hesitant to open this service up to the public until I know exactly what the costs will be, as right now the site brings in 0 revenue, so it wouldnt be worth paying a ton of money just for hosting until I get a revenue model set up.
Sure - use the Azure pricing calculator - http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/
The main question is: do I have to pay for unused resources? For instance, Azure pricing calculator says approximately $30/month for XS box. This includes about 750 hours. What if I don't use them all? This is normal for early stage, while development is in progress.
This is just to make it clear if its cheaper to have a virtual hosting for development and beta-testing purposes.
Not exactly a programming question.
That said: Windows Azure Compute instances are metered by the hour, and metering happens when you have deployed instances (whether running or stopped). If you're doing dev work, deploy for an hour or two (or how long it takes you to test), then delete the deployment. Very easy to delete, very easy to redeploy. Just don't delete the actual hosted service definition (urlname.cloudapp.net, associated certificates, affinity group, etc.). Following this pattern, it's easy to test with 5-10 concurrent instances in a deployment throughout the month - just remember to delete the deployment after each test cycle.
#Bart is partially right about SQL Azure being billed for the month. It's actually amortized daily. This also means: If you set up a 5GB db and only have 99MB on a given day (or days), you're billed at the $4.999 monthly rate / # of days in month). That's about 17 cents daily if you stay under 100MB. And if you delete the db, you're no longer billed.
Same goes for Cache - the cost is amortized daily.
I'd look at the full pricing page here.
You do not have to pay for unused resources in SOME of the services.
In your example, if you deploy a website for 10 hours you will be billed for the 10 hours of usage. PLUS any transactions/bandwidth associated with it.
However, some the services do have a flat fee. For example, if you deploy a 5 gig DB to SQL Azure and u do not use it...u will be billed the monthly rate even if it just sits there.
Also your definition of "use it" needs to be clear. Azure will bill you, if you have ANYTHING deployed. Even if the VM is stopped, you are getting billed. Therefore, the best solution is to:
- monitor your usage (its updated multiple times per day)
- use a free trial, MSDN account or promotion to see what the charges will be
- call MIcrosoft...Azure is the hot thing now and they WILL give you a break on charges if they are within reason.
Our company has until bought a lot VS Pro/Premium and Ultimate Licenses, and each includes a free Azure Account.
At the Azure Info day we have been told the best way would be to bundle them into one big account
(there is just too much overhead if every developer here would register that account on his own).
Do you know how to do this ?
Is there a special account manager we should contact ?
Thanks in advance,
Mathias Held
Each MSDN subscription has its own Windows Azure subscription with a given number of resources allocated per month. Those resources cannot be combined. For example, if you have 10 developers with MSDN Ultimate subscriptions, each with 1,500 Compute hours per month, you can NOT combine them into a single account with 15,000 Compute hours.
Regarding too much overhead: The task of enabling Windows Azure resources is incredibly simple. In fact, if you go to the new Windows Azure portal and sign in with the Live ID associated with your MSDN account, the portal will recognize that there's an associated Windows Azure subscription.
If your concern is that an individual dev won't have enough Windows Azure Compute resources monthly, this is more of an educational issue. At 1,500 monthly Compute hours (and Extra Small instances running at 1/3 Compute Hour), you have enough resources to run 2 Small instances 24x7 (or 6 Extra Small). The prudent advice is to delete all deployments when not in use (e.g. after work hours or between test deployments). This will give you much more breathing room and let you run much larger VM sizes without risk of going over allotted resources.
I'm considering to join the Windows Azure Platform Introductory Special, but I'm a little bit afraid of losing money with it. I don't wanna develop any fancy large scale application, I want to join just to learn Azure and do my experiments, what should I be afraid of?
In the transference, it says: "Data Transfers (per region)", what does that mean?
Can I put limits to stop the app if it goes over this plan in order to avoid get charged?
Can it be "pre pay" instead "bill pay"?
Would it be enough for a blog?
Any experiencie so far?
Kind regards.
As ligget pointed out, Azure isn't cost affect as a host for an application that can be easily deployed to a traditional shared hosting provider. Azure's target market are those that want dedicated resources without the need to micro-manage the infrasture and the capability to easily scale up/down based on demand.
That said, here's the answers to the questions you posted:
Data Transfers are based on bandwidth in and out of the hosting data center. bandwidth for communication occuring within components (SQL Azure, Windows Azure, Azure Storage, etc...) in the same datacenter are not billable.
Your usage is not currently capped when the free quotas are used up. However, you will recieved warning emails when those items approach their usage threadsholds.
There is the option to pay your subscription using a PO, but the minimum threshold for most of these operations is $500/month. So as a hobbyist, its unlikely you're wanting that route.
The introductory special does not provide enough resources for hosting a 24x7 personal blog. That level includes only 25hrs of compute resources. Each hour a single instance of your application is deployed will count against this, even if the application received no traffic. Think of it like renting office space. You still pay rent on the office even if there are no customers there.
All this said, there's still much to be learned with the introductory special. The azure development tools allows you to work with Windows Azure and Azure storage locally and get a feel for how they work. The introductory special then lets you deploy those solutions so you can see what works and what doesn't (not everything that works locally works hosted).
I would recommend you host your blog somewhere else - it's a waste of resources running it on Azure and you'll find much cheaper options. A recently introduced extra small instance would be a better choice in this case, but AFAIK it is charged separately as of now, e.g. even when you have an MSDN subscription those extra small instance hours do not count towards free Azure hours that come with the subscription.
There is no pre-pay option I know of and it's not possible to stop the app automatically. It'll be running until the deployment is deleted (beware! even if suspended/stopped the deployment will continue to accrue charges). I believe you will be sent a notification shortly before reaching your free hours threshold.
Be aware that when launching more than 1 instance you are charged for every hour of every instance combined. This can happen for example when you have more than one role in your Azure project (1 web role + 1 worker role - a separate instance will be started for each role).
Data trasfer means your entire data trasfer: blobs/Table storage/queues (transfers between your hosted service and storage account inside the same data center are free) + whatever data is transfered in/out of your hosted application, e.g. when somebody visits your pages. When you create storage accounts and hosted services in Azure you will specify a region that will be hosting your account/app - hosting in Asia is slightly more expensive than in Europe/U.S.
Your best bet would be to contact Microsoft with these questions.