Estimating Azure costs for an asp.net website & Db?

Question

I have recently been looking at Azure as a hosting platform for a number of small asp.net websites with MSSql database back-ends. I currently use a non-microsoft host that charges a fixed amount each month.

The Azure demos and webinars that I have seen are very seductive. The problem I have is that I need some predictability on costs so that I can charge my clients appropriately. I've run thru a number of pricing calculators but have gotten a wide mix of results. In the real world what could I expect?

The sites would be low traffic (<100 unique visits a day).

My biggest fear is that I would open the management dashboard some day and see a bill that is far bigger then what I quoted a client.

Anyone have experience with Azure, and could give me some insight into their experiences?

As an example: I currently have 6 small sites that I have under my reseller account at a hosting service. I pay ~$35.00/month for all the space I need, including SQL, and bandwidth.

Answer 1

Let me share my thoughts on this.

Before looking at costs, I think what you need to evaluate if a cloud platform is a right platform for your applications. The picture below summarizes some of the common application patterns:

2 biggest benefits (at least to me) that you get out of any cloud platform is elasticity and pay-per-use pricing model. Generally speaking for low volume sites, cloud is generally costlier than other hosting providers. The questions you may want to ask yourself are:

• Do my applications need elasticity as far as resource consumption is concerned? Or in other words, will there be a scenario where you would need 1 server for a week and then 10 servers for next week and then 1 server again week after that and things like that.
• Am I willing to pay some extra even if my resources are under utilized? Or in other words, will you be happy to host a site in a single VM even if with a hosting company you can host 10 sites in a similar sized VM?
• Will there be any scenarios where I have to handle predictable/unpredictable bursting in traffic?

If the answer is No to any of these questions, then IMHO Windows Azure may not be a right platform for you to host your applications.

There may be some components of Windows Azure which you can use - Storage for example where you don't have to worry about running out of disk space ever or Mobile Services so that you don't have to worry about building a backend for any mobile applications you may develop.