The death of Silverlight Streaming (a free hosting service provided by Microsoft) made me think through the cost of hosting small apps and sites on Windows Azure. [edit 25 Feb - and it turns out I'm not alone]
Although Azure’s pricing model might make sense for Enterprise scenarios, the math doesn’t seem to add up for smaller-scale applications.
The problem for Microsoft, as I see it, is that these smaller-scale apps could drive breadth adoption of Azure by developers and SMBs.
The Cost of a Simple Media-Driven Azure Site
Azure compute time is 12 cents an hour, and by compute time, Azure means “up-time,” not compute cycles used. Storage is an additional 15 cents per gigabyte [edit 25 Feb - turns out this rate is per month as per comments and this MSDN article - edits and changes inline and my thoughts remain largely the same about the TCO].
So we’re talking just shy of $7.00 $3.00 per day just to keep any app up on Azure. That’s almost $200 $70 a month!
The FractLOL is a simple streaming app that would be prohibitively expensive if hosted on Azure
Let’s take a simple and illustrative example: the FractLOL, a Silverlight+DeepZoom app. I needed to move it from Silverlight Streaming before it dies on the 31st.
I say it is an “illustrative” example because:
- For a small website, the inclusion of rich media content like a Silverlight Deep Zoom might be exactly the sort of differentiating feature that would make Azure or some other cloud computing solution appealing.
- When I first posted it, it got slammed with thousands of hits a day, and experienced the sort of brief spikes in traffic that a cloud data centre could gracefully support, but a shared hosting scenario could not.
But I ran this app through the Windows Azure TCO Calculator and it came back with an estimated cost for the app of $12,334/year. Umm.. ok.
Unfortunately, Azure wasn’t even remotely a contender.
And Then There’s Developers
Starving Developers want to explore Azure!
Not only does this pricing model make a small Azure site prohibitively expensive for its owners, but for prospective Azure developers, the “Developer Accelerator” package clocks in at a considerable $59.95 per month.
Honestly, sometimes I feel like I am being actively discouraged from experimenting with Azure.
Turns Out I’m Not Alone…
No wonder, as Mary Jo Foley reports, the number one request for Azure is to change the pricing model for small-scale apps, and the number two request is to continue to make Azure free for developers.
For now, my FractLOL has been moved over to hoster Godaddy where it’s hanging out on a shared IIS server where, admittedly, it doesn’t scale.
But it’s costing me – wait for it – $0/month.
I wait in hope…
Possibly Related Articles (possibly not):
Forecast calls for Azure skies
TechDays 2009: ‘Optimizing Your Apps for Windows 7′ Follow-up
From Windows DVD Maker to Silverlight Streaming site?
Posted Jan 28th, 2010
into Developer, Microsoft, Silverlight
with tags Azure, cloud computing, FractLOL, Godaddy, pricing model, shared hosting
What am I missing, .12 / hour * 24 hours = $2.88 / day != $7.00 / day
Justin: .12 (compute) + .15 (storage) = .27 / hour * 24 hours = $6.48 / day * 30 days = $194.40 / month, or just shy of $200 / month.
Even if I were mistaken and it’s actually $2.88 / day, that’s still compared to $4.99 / MONTH (or roughly .06 / day) for GoDaddy’s Economy Windows plan.
And the Azure baseline price is more than 5 times the amount of Godaddy’s Unlimited Plan, which includes unlimited SQL and costs $14.99 / MONTH (0.50 / day).
The storage is .15c / month / gb, not per hour. Event still, I agree with your point that Azure is not economical for small sites. I don’t think it is meant to be, though. That is what shared hosting is for.
Ely – yes, thanks, I should be more clear. The sample app I describe is approximately 900MB, so I am assuming I will be charged 0.15 / month for that portion of a gigabyte.
Actually, I am assuming that I would be charged the whole 0.15/month for the partial gigabyte even if my app was only a few megs in size. Thus as far as I can tell, $194 is the baseline price to keep ANY Azure app up for a month.
I’m not sure that I agree that smaller-scale apps like this should be considered outside the scope of cloud computing. What about a mostly-low-traffic site that could potentially “go viral”? Isn’t one of the many promises of cloud computing that it could potentially scale near-effortlessly during a brief spike in traffic?
@Rob, I guess there is a premium to pay for the ability to scale on a dime. Azure is running your app in a virtualized server, taking up much more resources than it normally would in a shared hosting environment, which means higher costs.
Azure should price like Heroku (Rails cloud hosting). Free for the small stuff and goes up from there.
*** Ely – yes, thanks, I should be more clear. ***
No, the problem is that you are flat wrong. And not even listening to what you’re being told. It’s .15 PER MONTH per gigabyte NOT PER HOUR, and yet you keep on quoting it as if it were .15 per hour. Your “baseline price” would NOT be $194 but rather .12 * 24 * 30 = $85.40 for cpu. And 15 cents for storage. For a total of $84.55. Got it now?
I have updated the article with
strikethroughsbecause the above comment reads like I still don’t understand the cost model. However, I do think I now understand it, but feel the same way about the revised costing.This February 2010 article on MSDN supports the fact that I was right about server usage, but originally mistaken about the storage prices, which are indeed per average-gigabyte-month rather than per average-gigabyte-day.
The revised rate of $85 a month is much less than $194, but I don’t think I’m flat-out wrong with the point of this article. $85/month or over $1000/year is still pretty considerable for a small-scale app. If you’ve consulted with SMBs then you know what I mean.
Also, Microsoft’s TCO Calculator reading of $12,334 for the ‘FractLOL’ demo app wasn’t a fiction. Look, the cats may be cute, but they’re just not worth $12k a year. Sorry cats.
I am agreeing with Ely that I suppose that this is currently the premium we have to pay for the ability to scale on a dime, and Azure’s pricing model just may not be targeted to small applications and content at this time.
Despite the bickering, I agree with the author’s argument. Currently, I have a dedicated server with 1and1.co.uk, and it costs me something like £100 a month. This is with unlimited 100mbs connection, lots of disk space, sql database, etc, etc. I costed it up on Windows Azure, the whole package would cost me many times that (I think, I couldn’t be 100% sure). I take Microsoft’s point about scalablity, reliability and whatnot, but in truth, it’s just too expensive. The sad thing is, I would love to develop for the platform; in my line of work, it would be a good tickbox for my CV. The pricing gears it towards the enterprise rather than individuals, but paradoxically, it’s developers like me that would learn it, support it and drive it into enterprises in the first place, but I’m being cut out from developing for it.
It would be good if Microsoft had just a fixed monthly price for hosting an application, if they could say to me “to host your app, it’ll cost you this”, and for that you can have “x transfer, running on n instances, this much data” I would think about it more. Right now, I just don’t know how much it would cost me – I can’t live with that, so I’m staying on my dedicated server for now.
Rob, not to dispute your general assertions about the viability of Windows Azure for small applications, but if your application used to be hosted on Silverlight Streaming, that meant it’s a pure storage solution, right? (It doesn’t require ASP.NET or PHP, for example.) There’s no requirement in Windows Azure that you have to use any VMs at all, so for your application, you may be able to get away with just using storage. At that point, you’d be paying less than $2 for hosting ($0.15 per month), and all you’d pay for is the bandwidth.
Hi Paul:
re: “It would be good if Microsoft had just a fixed monthly price for hosting an application, if they could say to me “to host your app, it’ll cost you this”, and for that you can have “x transfer, running on n instances, this much data” I would think about it more. Right now, I just don’t know how much it would cost me – I can’t live with that, so I’m staying on my dedicated server for now.”
Question: how close is something like the $59.95/month Dev Accelerator offer to what you might need: http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsAzure/offers/popup.aspx?lang=en&locale=en-US&offer=MS-AZR-0006P
Hi Rob,
In your type of application, you will feel the real hit in your wallet with the traffic cost. Here is why:
- You have a database of ~900Mb of kitten data. As users zoom in and out, the application downloads more and more of this database into the user’s client. For the purpose of this calculation, let’s assume that the average user downloads 25Mb of data, or ~3% of the database.
- According to your statement, you have “thousands of visits” a day. Let’s assume that means 2,000 visits a day.
- 2000 visits times 25Mb per visit means 50Gb of outgoing trafic per day. At $0.15 per Gb, that means $7.5 per day, or ~$220 per month, or ~$2500 per year. The more your kitten get popular, the more you pay (note that Azure does not even have an option to close your site when the payment exceeds a certain barrier, so you may find yourself one day with a million accesses on your site and life long debts to Microsoft).
Godaddy, as comparison, has an unlimited bandwidth plan with Windows server for just $15 / month.
Yoel, beware of “unlimited” plans. Bandwidth really does cost money. See http://www.findmyhosting.com/the-truth-about-unlimited-bandwidth/.
Azure forces you to come up with sound business models that pay. That means sites that host lolcats are out.
Saddumal,
It definitely does, but that’s not really the argument. My argument here is essentially that Azure is only a good fit for some types of applications, which, by your definition are paid applications. Other applications that don’t necessarily make large amounts of money are cut out. I keep coming back to my http://www.walkmate.co.uk work, it would’ve been a great fit do develop on Azure. Although not big at the moment, there’s definitely a time when if it could grow into a good size application where running on Azure makes sense. At the moment, it’s better running on a single dedicated server. The problem is, I would’ve liked it to have been built in a way compatible with Azure, and then running an Azure compatible environment on my own server, allowing me to move it in the Cloud with little effort when it makes sense to do that. As it is, I would need to do a lot of rework to make it compatible with Azure. I’m in favour of an installable, Azure Express, which I can install and use without needing to go to Microsoft’s datacenters, which has usage limits on it, so that I can port easily to Azure when the time is right. I think a lot of others feel this too, from discussions I’ve had at work.
I think what you’re saying is absolutely correct, Azure does force you to come up with a sound business model that pays, but… I don’t think it should.
Thanks,
Paul