Question

I’m an msdn subscriber and I’m looking at Azure as a possible platform for a new website that will test the water of a new service. This website is expecting low to very low traffic at the time of launch. I’ve heard that this kind of traffic levels is very expensive for Azure but since they have this msdn offer, I thought I’d finally take a look at Azure.

In the offer, I’m looking at getting “750 small compute hours per month”. From the reading I’ve done, this seems that, if I purchase nothing more than what’s given (although the subscription itself is thousands of dollars of course), that an entire month would be covered. Since 24 (hours) x 31 (max days in a month) = 744 I’m still below my allotted 750 for the month.

Am I missing something else from this simple equation? Is there further aspects that could cause the site to be “turned off” temporarily that should be considered?

Answer 1

Yes, you can indeed run a small instance during a whole month. Or you can have 2 extra-small instances instead (having 2 instances means you’re covered by the SLA).

There are 2 other things you need to consider:

• Depending on your subscription you can have maximum 45GB of storage (blob/table/queue). If you use Virtual Machines you need to know that the system disk (and additional data disks) are persisted as blobs, so make sure not to reach the limit here.
• There are also other limits active, but the most important one besides storage is the data transfer limit which is also very limited (max 35GB out).

If you’re expecting very low traffic, did you ever consider Windows Azure Web Sites? You get 10 of those for free during 12 months. The free ones run on shared instances, but they are perfect to host the first low-traffic version of your app.