This week Microsoft finally revealed its pricing structure for Windows Azure hosting services. Using Azure to host the simplest website in the world costs a minimum of $0.12 / hour. Work out the math: 0.12 * 24 * 30 = $86.40 / month.
While this might sound reasonable to a large organization with tons of traffic or anyone currently using Amazon EC2 or Rackspace’s Mosso, this is way out of reach for the majority of developers and organizations who are just trying to create a useful webservice or website that could scale in the off chance their idea took off or got mentioned by the press.
Based on this pricing it’s obvious that Microsoft is trying to compete with Amazon and targetting the same market. Nevertheless, I personally had high hopes that Microsoft was actually trying to compete with Google App Engine by offering the first and only affordable and scalable Windows hosting option… which raises the point: (in case anyone from Microsoft is listening) if Microsoft wants .NET to compete long-term as a server-side platform (which is essential for Windows to thrive as a server-side OS), someone is going to have to solve this problem soon or it will find itself playing catch-up.
I love Windows Azure and I believe it is a great, simple and affordable option for the big boys. But as Windows Azure leaves beta and the world says hello, I say goodbye before I have to start coughing up ~$100/mo for my personal websites. Back to shared hosting at GoDaddy ($4/mo for Windows + SQL).
Programmer Payback 
Hear hear. I have this same problem. I’d like to find a scalable provider for ASP.NET and SQL Server that is not around the $100/mo mark. Gogrid, Mosso, now Azure.
With the LAMP stack being free to the cloud, and Microsoft software costing real money, what I find is that IIS/Windows and SQL Server generally cost more per month. A lot more.
If I could go to LAMP, I would be able to use RackSpace Cloud Servers for .06/hour ($43/mo) with 1024MB memory and 40GB of disk. Try finding that price level for IIS/SQL Server. GoGrid is 80$/month or so for a 512mb windows server- that’s the best deal I can find.
I wonder if I made a mistake working with C#, ASP.Net all these years…
Thanks for posting–I was looking for a simple summary of Azure pricing and there’s my answer.
Totally agree. Will not go into Azure with these prices.
I agree, it’s a real missed opportunity. MSFT could stand to gain by a real affordable hosted .NET platform, and they can afford it since they’re not “paying” for the licenses unlike these other hosts.
While I really don’t want to colo and maintain my own servers anymore, the real issue I have with this pricing model is that it’s PER APPLICATIOn, and you’re paying that much for each domain/subdomain regardless of the traffic/compute cycles used.
At least with RackSpace Cloud Sites I can run multiple sites and “amortize” the cost across them… not to mention the deployment is easier, etc. And if you can use MySQL instead of MSSQL, you have plenty of DB space built in.
I’m looking to get off my servers after one of them failed and I was having issues with my hosting provider. After looking at Azure closely, I went with Mosso… signed up today, so we’ll see how it works out over the next month 🙂
Thanks for the tip on Mosso – added to my favorites for later consideration :-). I’m interested in your experience with them!
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