My question is pretty simple: does hosting a website on Windows Azure, require 24 "compute" hours per day?
That is, what would it cost me to host a website for a month, storing 1GB data, with 1GB transferred out per month?
I understand the data and message pricing model, but is just having a site up there (on Azure) going to cost me $0.12/hr?
is just having a site up there (on Azure going to cost me $0.12/hr?
Yes. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/
Windows Azure compute hours are charged only for when your application is deployed. When developing and testing your application, developers will want to remove the compute instances that are not being used to minimize compute hour billing.
(emphasis mine)
It is $0.12 / hr at this point in time. If you would like to know more about the total cost of ownership of deploying an application with Windows Azure, I recommend using the Windows Azure Total Cost of Ownership calculator. That calculator can be found here.
Until Azure adds support for "Shared" VM's, the pricing model is still hard on to justify for smaller websites that may or may not ever scale. For instance, websites that only get a few hundred, or few thousand unique visitors, is just not enough to justify the base Azure costs (1 VM). Where Azure really shines is in its scalability. You can even start up more VM's during peak hours, and shut them down during off-peak hours, minimizing costs. Better yet, you can even code your app smart enough to where it'll auto-spin-up/down instances as needed, without need for human intervention at all.
Bottom line is, if you have any hopes of making money off a service, the minimal-VM setup is a very realistic cost.. But if you do not anticipate ever breaking even, stick with a shared hosting environment.
Something I realized when watching Dianne O'Brien's talk from the PDC (The Business of Windows Azure: What you should know about Windows Azure Platform pricing and SLAs) is - Azure isn't 'web hosting' it is a data center. For some reason this didn't hit me until I watched that video.
For me to move my website makes little sense, but to host a customer's web application which requires some sort of SLA makes more sense.
If you application is fine on a mom and pop web host with a sql server db ... then currently Azure is probably more that what you need. If you need a data center quality hosting, then you should look at it as one of you options (and look at their SLA's and pricing).
That's my 12 cents on it :)
That's interesting. In £GBP that would amount to around £55 per month. Our cost to colocate our own server is £50 per month although we have had to shell out for a server, software, SSL certificates etc.
For us the gains of colocating are much more compelling and give us control instead of relying on our ISP to resource application pools adequately. We log all activity to our database and have evidence of the number of lost sales on the Payment page due to inadequate memory, there were 32 failures instances on our sites (average sale is £80) and have calculated that last year in Quarter4 alone we lost £2500 in turnover (That means on an annual basis £4000 for profits that we should have got) due to under-resourcing, so watch the hidden costs. It can be cheaper to bite the bullet and take colocating costs on board. We went live with our own server the first week of this year and so far it has been mostly positive.
For me at this stage Azure does not make commercial sense.
Billing on Azure starts today - what we've just realised is that every deployed role, not just deployment, will be ticking up compute hours, whether it is running or not
so - I have (no, make that had) an Azure app that managed to acquire 3 roles - one standard web app, one WCF (because I couldn't get WCF to work in the standard web app), and a worker role.
Because I like to think I'm a careful deployer, I always had a production and staging deployment. Because I'm lazy, I forget to take the staging down when I was finished
So, that was 3 roles per deployment, times 2 = 6 roles. They get charged compute hours whether they are running or not, so that was 144 compute hours a day
For some reason, I just heard $0.12 per hour, and thought "that sounds reasonable" about "$0.12", without really thinking through, or bothering to find out, what the "per hour" actually meant in practice ... for me, it would have been £300 per month ... ow
I frantically pulled down the site today, the first day of billing, when I realised what it meant, but I'm guessing I'm not the only one in this situation
I predict a lot of very sorry forgetful developers in one month, who possibly will suddenly owe Microsoft far more than they ever actually paid them for software ...
caveat emptor