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…

To celebrate, I’ve updated the FractLOL to Silverlight 2 RTW, and fully intend to subject you to it again. Here. Right now.

Note: Silverlight Streaming has now been fully updated to Silverlight RTW. The FractLOL can be viewed on the Mac or PC, so long as you install the lightweight Silverlight 2 plug-in from Microsoft. [Updated on the 2nd of November.]

I’ve also updated the FractLOL page on this blog with a bit more information about how this came to be.

Here are links to the LOL+Arts Site, curator Marianne Goldin’s blog, and the announcement on icanhascheezburger.com.

I love this image they used to promote the event on icanhascheezburger, and wish I had a high-res version for my desktop wallpaper:

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past few months, it’s that if you want to drive traffic to your blog, technical articles can be pretty good, but you should really just save yourself the time and energy and just add cats.

LOLCats, akshuly.

Here is the full screen version.

Click, drag, shift-click and use the mouse wheel to see that the image is made of over 10,000 LOLCats (there are 2,442 unique images here).

How this came to be?

The kittehs are from the very awesum icanhascheezburger.com which I love and will link to again because I hope they will also find this awesum and not tell me to make it go away.

The photomosaic was generated using AndreaMosaic, a utility for making fun images like this one.

The output of AndreaMosaic got processed by Deep Zoom Composer and turned into a Silverlight app.

And then uploaded to Silverlight Streaming which lets me host these kittehs on the intarwebs without bringing mai wee server to its knees (i hope i hope i hope).