what are the Azure thresholds for the 10 free sites account, is this for life

Question

I'm looking for some answers, on Azure from people who are hosting there on the mini account, i.e. 10 free sites.

Specifically:

1. After the 90 days is it free for life, as far as you dont exceed the compute
2. What thresholds do they set.
3. If the threshold is exceeded do they charge or turn your service off for that period/month

The trial period and 10 sites free for life is tempting for developers but hard to understand, and very confusing. We realize Azure is trying to match/compete with the free Amazon account for elastic computing. But, the services are not clear.

On the following page http://www.microsoft.com/Web/webmatrix/signin.aspx

It states "If you don’t already have Windows Azure Web Sites, you'll be prompted to sign up for a free trial, which includes 10 web sites that you can keep even after the free trial ends."

What exactly does this mean which includes 10 web sites that you can keep even after the free trial ends?? Does it mean, if I dont cross the compute allocations, I can keep it for life, like officelive for small business that you had earlier

Answer 1

While I can't give a definitive answer on what the future may bring (considering Web Sites is in Preview), I can point out a few specifics you may or may not have seen:

First: General Availability pricing is now documented. That is, when Web Sites leaves Preview, the pricing is now published. Here's a snippet showing the Free tier and its associated resources (disk, CPU, etc.).

Next: Pricing time period. The 90-day trial includes a whole bunch of free resources, one of them being 10 free sites on Web Sites. If you continue after the 90-day trial, you pay for consumed resources. However: There remains a free tier for Web Sites (with all the abovementioned resources included for free as well). And currently, this page states that those 10 free sites will remain in effect for 12 months following the end of the trial:

Now: Will your 10 free sites go beyond 12 months? I frankly don't know. However: The Pricing page does call out a Free tier. And there's documentation showing you'd be good for at least a year. Beyond that, I think we'll need to wait for General Availability to hit and see if there's any update to the pricing scheme.