: Does Azure have a free until some limit program? Amazon offers free services for 1 year http://aws.amazon.com/free/, supports .NET Google offers them free until you reach some limit, but does

@Sent6035632

Regarding:


Amazon offers free services for 1 year aws.amazon.com/free/, supports .NET


Please bear in mind that the free instances are Linux - so you'll need to get Mono working for .Net within the free system.



Also, if your load is constant (e.g. if you just want to have 2 instances always running) then please look at the subscription rates for both AWS and Azure - if you pay upfront then both services offer cheaper rates.

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@Cofer257

Regarding your one bullet point:


Azure costs [CO].12/hour, you need at least two instances=>0.12x2x24x30=2/month


You're only required to have one instance of a given VM, but if you want SLA in case your VM goes offline for any reason (like the underlying hardware failing, or the OS being updated), you'll need 2 or more instances. Same goes for Amazon. You don't magically get failover on a service running on a single VM. With Amazon, don't forget the cost of a load-balancer as well (which is built into the Windows Azure Compute pricing).

As Kevin Cloet pointed out, Extra Small instances are priced at 0.05 per hour, which would allow you to have a 2-instance deployment for monthly, giving you SLA as well.

Be careful when comparing to "normal" hosting. Most discount hosting is shared hosting, and your app is placed on a box alongside potentially dozens of other tenants, with no consistent performance. If one of those tenants is abusive with CPU and bandwidth, your site will suffer.

One more thing: With Windows Azure, you have a compute+storage emulator that runs locally. While there are some differences, you can typically perform the majority of your development work locally.

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