I’m building a SaaS application for a niche industry. The application is architectured so that each subscriber gets their own instance of the application (to allow for customisations, for example). This is basically a copy of the website files (ASP.NET MVC stuff) and a SQL Database. Simple enough.
I’m considering moving over to Windows Azure – my hardware colocation costs have been rising (about £450GBP a month now, and then there’s the cost of acquiring new hardware, as well as the time required to manage everything). Windows Azure’s Platform-as-a-Service presents a considerable cost-savings not only in monetary terms but also in time I don’t have to spend doing server housekeeping (or messing around with Dell’s outsoured support team when a motherboard dies).
Remember, I’m talking about the PaaS service, I’m not interested in using VMs, because that has the same housekeeping trouble as physical servers.
Now then, one service I am/was considering offering my customers was also web hosting and Hosted Exchange. Both of these services were to be offered from my colocated hardware, but with Azure without VMs I don’t have the ability to create arbitrary websites in IIS.
Windows Azure does provide simple web-hosting services and I could use that to sell web-hosting to my end-users, but I can’t find any resources online that say if that’s allowed by Microsoft.
As for Hosted Exchange – Microsoft doesn’t offer Exchange-on-Azure (unless you bring your SPLA license to a VM running Exchange), but if I’m going in that direction I might as well ditch self-management entirely and just resell a white-label Hosted Exchange service.
Going back to websites, does anyone know if I can directly charge other people to create/manage Azure Websites on their behalf?
As far as I know there is nothing stopping you from doing this from a MSFT perspective, as a SAAS provider you will manage everything for the end client, you will just be utilising Azure PAAS as your hosted environment and self manage your SASS applications. You have a number of options, Cloud Services (Web and Worker) or Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS – which have a shared or reserved model), check out this blog post for guidance on what best fits your needs: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/silverlining/archive/2012/06/27/windows-azure-websites-web-roles-and-vms-when-to-use-which.aspx
Depending on your requirements and obviously price point then pick the model that works best for you, *note WAWS shared instances currently don’t allow Custom Domains (future roadmap).
With regards Hosted Exchange, is there a potential Office 365 play here, MSFT have the SAAS offering already, you could be the Systems Integrator (SI) to get it going, food for thought…
HTH