Confused about Azure hosting and billing?

Question

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: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2524096/getting-started-with-windows-azure

Answer 1

Hi Evan,

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...

Answer 2

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.