i have an idea of putting my blog on to Azure instead of a regular webhosting company.
The only thing i cannot figure out is if that will be cheaper or not. The good part is the getting-knowledge of Azure but on the other hand it is my personal blog and i really don't wanna spend to much money on it.
So do you have any idea of how the pricing works? I saw some calculator but didn't manage to understand the numbers.
Thanks in advance
You'd have to have a significantly-active blog to justify the costs of Azure. Aside from keeping a web role up and running (and just one instance chews up almost $90 monthly, as ZippyV stated), you'll also have to pay for data.
You do NOT need to invest in SQL Azure though. There's Azure table storage which is much better suited for your blog. It has a table structure, you can define entities (e.g. classes, maybe a BlogEntryClass) that are stored, and the storage costs will run you significantly less than SQL Azure (only $0.15 per GB per month, so your storage costs will likely remain well under a dollar a month for a blog, a small fraction of the cost of SQL Azure).
You'll also pay for bandwidth ($0.15 outbound per GB).
If this is a learning exercise, it's a great investment, but if you have an MSDN Premium account, you can host your blog there - you get 750 compute-hours monthly (enough to run a single role instance 24x7), 10GB table storage, and 14GB monthly outbound data.
Classic webhosting will be a lot cheaper for you. In Azure you need to pay for at least 1 instance (webserver) to run per hour. At then end of the month you will have to pay about 89$ if I remember correctly and that's without SQL Server.
If you want to learn more on how to develop for Azure you can download the SDK and run your project locally. You don't need to pay for it.
EDIT: you can find the pricing here. If you want to add SQL server you pay a minimum of 100$ a month.
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
I did a lot of searching but I guess Windows Azure's trial offers are constantly changing and there is a lot of different information over the internet. I am looking to develop a small website for learning purposes using Azure. My questions are:
1) Are there still 10 free websites after my 30-day trial ends?
If yes,
2) Can I use Table/Blob store after the trial period?
3) Can I use Azure SQL instance after the trial period?
From the horses mouth, so to speak:
Web Sites Pricing Details
You can run up to 10 websites for Free in a shared environment.
Azure Table Storage will cost, but it's not all that much. Storage Pricing Details gives you a run down, but I find their Pricing Calculator to be quite useful.
As an example:
100GB of blob storage
100GB of tables and queues
10 million transactions per month
is a grand total of $9.90 USD per month.
I'm looking at the Azure shared plan for $10 per month. Does it come with SQL Server and MySQL? I'm looking to host my personal site and project. I don't anything fancy. Just need the latest .Net support and if possible unlimited MySQL or SQL Server.
Azure pricing can be very difficult to figure out. So while this may not be a programming question, it sounds a lot like a deployment question that needs community help to answer.
Azure websites don't come with any kind of database support built in, unless you're loading a website image from the gallery.
Generally, any kind of relational storage will cost money. But it just doesn't have to cost a lot of money. Microsoft now has "Basic" SQL Database instances (in preview) that could cost as little as $2.50 per month, with up to 2GB of space. For the time being they still have "Web" tier databases for $10 a month up to 1GB.
Also, nothing in Azure is "unlimited." You always have a nominal charge for storage and data transfers out of the datacenter. So even a "free" website will still cost a buck or two per month for infrastructure charges.
Note that if you have MSDN Premium or Ultimate, you get a $100 to $200 per month Azure credit.
I am using a normal IIS web host to host my website and web services.. It is just a hobby and I get very little traffic. I would let to be using Azure instead since I would like an excuse to learn azure.
Is anyone out there using Azure in this way and can tell me about what is thier monthly cost? I long ago subscribed to azure and forgot about it and a month later had a $90 bill so that really scares me.
Right now my web host + sql is about $25 a month.
Is there a way to have azure shut the service off if it gets over a certain monthly cost?
Well, even a very small instance costs $0.05/hour, and the SLA is only guaranteed if you run two or more instances. That in itself adds up to approximately $75/month.
SQL Azure is at least $9.99/month. Add to this charges for traffic, etc.
There are reasons why the SQL Azure pricing model is like this. You do get your very own virtual machine instances with dedicated RAM, which you typically don't get in a web hotel, so taking that into account, the Azure price may be reasonable, but isn't very competitive for very small hobby sites.
The official price list is here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/
Unfortunately, Azure is not designed to host hobbyist sites. You won't be able to beat $25 a month, but then you don't need things like SLA's and HA databass. But, as I commented earlier, it is nice to be able to work with it to train up on the platform.
There are ways of getting onto Azure cheaply.
Firstly There is the free introductory offer. Very much a "toe in the water" just to play/learn the platform. There aren't enough compute hours to host a site.
Secondly, if you're prepared to put in a little effort you can join either the partner or Bizspark programs which will give you access to enough resources to host a site for free, but there is an expectation that you're trying to build "something".
Oh, and for a hobbyist site you don't need the SLA so a single instance is fine.
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.