(Cross-posted to my company's blog.)
If you’ve looked at Microsoft’s Azure pricing model, you’ve no doubt had some difficulty figuring out what makes the most economic sense. What size instances do I need? How many roles? How much storage? What will my monthly bill actually be?
Since June 7th, Microsoft has had one price for an entry-level offering that is completely comprehensible: free. You can now run up to 10 web sites on a shared instance for free. (Well, you have to pay for data output over 165 MB per month at 12c per gigabyte, and if the site needs a SQL Database, that’s at least $5 a month, etc.)
At 10th Magnitude, we’ve switched to free Azure websites for our dev and staging instances of some internal applications and for our brochure site. And it’s saving us real money.
There are limitations, which I’ll get to, but c’mon: free. A shared-instance Azure website is perfect if you have a small, low-bandwidth, compute-light web application that only needs, maybe, a small MySQL database or some XML files. They even have a quick-start gallery that includes DotNetNuke, dasBlog, WordPress, and a few other open source packages—also free.
So here’s how those limitations hit: Free Azure web sites run on a shared virtual machine with who-knows-how-many other people, and you get an “extra-small” VM to boot (1 GHz processor, 768 MB of RAM). You can’t use Azure tables or blobs with it, and “free” only includes 5 hours of compute time and 165 MB of data going out per month. Most important, you can’t use a custom host header, so your site URL will be “something.azurewebsites.net” instead of “www.something.com”. You can get more, better, faster, and your own domain name by going to a Reserved web site instance—but that is decidedly not free.
Take a look at the pricing model. Our official brochure site runs in an extra-small Azure web role, but doesn’t use a SQL database, nor does it use much storage, compute power, or data egress. The bill comes to about $30 per month. That’s not bad at all, considering how much dedicated hosting costs generally (really, Rackspace? $150 per month is your cheapest deal?).
Let’s say we double that $30 because we’re not going to slap our chief marketing website up there without a private staging instance. So now our $30 site costs $60, and remember, we aren’t even using a database.
Or, in fact, go ahead and triple it to $90, because we need a dedicated dev instance as well. Our CMO, Jen, needs room to experiment, try new designs, and test-drive new marketing approaches, which we don’t want on our staging instance in case we accidentally promote it to production.
Why not use a virtual machine, then? Here’s where Microsoft’s pricing gets tricky. An extra-small VM is less than $10 per month during the “preview period” going on right now, but you’ll need storage to hold the VM, and you’ll still have to pay for bandwidth. That puts the real price around $30 a month.
We could, in theory, run all three environments (production, staging, preview) on the single VM. But who in his right mind would run all three environments on one VM? So we’re back to two VMs—or three—so $90 a month.
By the way, reserved instances have another limitation, which may have something to do with Microsoft’s own capacity constraints as they build out new datacenters. Extra-small reserved instances aren’t available right now, so you’re stuck getting a small instance at $60 per month. I’ll have more on reserved instances in a subsequent post, because they’re great if you have an existing, complex Web application you want to move to the Cloud but don’t want to refactor it to use Azure cloud services.
In short, we’re saving about $60 per month—67%—by using free Azure web sites instead of Web roles or VMs. And that’s just for our corporate brochure. Add what we’re saving for our internal applications, and now we’re talking about more pizza and beer for the developers real savings.
More next post on solving challenges with staging on an Azure web site and hosting the production version in a Web role.