Question

I’m a small software company (me and one other), and we currently pay about £50 per month ($75 ) for our hosting. We have 2 VPS machines to cover our 12 websites.

Now, I’m looking towards Azure to see if it will suit our requirements. I have a few questions that I hope people could help me with:

1. The websites we have are not heavily used (100 visitors per day maximum) however we have 12 currently. With Azure, do you only pay when the website is used or when the machine is “ON”? It’ll need to be on 24/7 like our current host
2. Would we create one deployment machine and put all 12 websites on there? If we need 12 different hosted services could it get expensive very quickly?
3. What would we do about sending / receiving email and scheduled tasks? There is a remote desktop session available, so presumably I could install Smarter Mail and our scheduled task applications on here?

I’ve had a test with the portal and publishing, and it seems pretty smart (other than no full text search for SQL Azure) but I’d really appreciate other people’s experience.

Answer 1

1. You pay CPU time, i.e. when the machine is running
2. You can deploy multiple websites on one web role
3. Scheduled tasks would probably require an additional worker role, i.e. additional cost