Servers

[bennyboy]

Azure runs virtual machines.  So short answer-- right; my server is basically a VPS.  Long answer-- there's a lot more to Azure than the FPS.  You can pick up or drop all kinds of apps, services, analytic tools, etc. etc. that I wouldn't normally consider part of a VPS.  I strongly recommend signing up for a free month.  Maybe you can look at some of the features and let me know if you think they're just BS, or if there's more going on there.

When I migrated the site, I planned for it to be temporary.  However, the site actually runs faster from the cloud than it did on my (admittedly shitty) small 3rd-party-provided server.  I'm paying a pretty penny for it, but in my company budget, $100/month compared to say a day of downtime or some unexplained crashes is just not worth trying another solution.

So VPS with some bells and whistles. I don't really need to sign up for a free month, because unless I'm going to consider paying for it after, there's really no point. I mean, I just looked at the pricing calculator. For what I pay $40 a month for now (4 CPU, 8GB RAM) they are charging $139.43. Plus, that only comes with 40GB of "temporary" storage, whatever that means. If I want to add 128GB of space (current VPS has 160GB) it would cost another $5 a month.

No amount of fancy bells and whistles are worth that much for me, I don't have any use for them. With a regular Linux VPS, I can install a web server in 10 minutes, I have a load of config files that I have backed up from previous servers which I can just copy / paste across. Applications aren't that hard to install if you know what you are doing.

Yeah, I get it.  The cheapest option I could find was:
0.75 GB RAM / 1 core / 32GB hard drive with Linux installed = $14.68 / month.  Adding an extra core and 8BG ram will put that price up really fast though.  I'm curious though. . . do you know what a "core" means?  Does it depend on the base hardware, or is it a standard # of Teraflops, or what?

I actually opted for a 2-core 8GB system, and I have to say it's performing like a real champ: very nice and quick page loads handling a couple hundred customers who use the site daily for an hour or two. I'm also curious-- is your $40 / month billed by hour? Do you have any commitments other than paying for what you use each month? I ask because I may put up a sister site on a US server some day.

IIRC, the "temporary" storage is true temp storage. . . used only for page caching etc., but not to be expected to maintain state reliably, especially if you restart the server/site.

I went to Azure after shopping around in Korea, and then Singapore and other Asian countries, and not liking their offers or the reviews about them.  My budget for a managed server for my company was going to be $300, so when I realized I could get a setup that would meet my needs for $100, and that it would be hosted in Korea but with full English support, I was pretty ecstatic.  Korean internet = extended LAN.

Also, I like Windows.  So, there's that.

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You are right about Azure. I also think it's more useful for teamwork on large projects, then its cost would be justified.
Only used Ubuntu once or twice, so I guess it's very early for me to move into a VPS.

I'd agree with this sentiment-- Microsoft charges a premium for the name, for sure.  In my case, having trust that things will work properly was worth much more than an extra $60/month. But based on what Tiberius is saying, it seems that however I push or pull my order, it's going to be about 3x more expensive than some other offers out there.

With regard to a VPS-- I very highly recommend it.  I've discovered that any bargain fully-managed dedicated server is almost for sure using hardware so old that a good-quality VPS will outperform it.  But the extra control you get over your site on a VPS is pretty much the same as a fully dedicated device, and it's not really that hard to set things up.

I think you should try Azure for free, since you can scale your VM up or down as much as you want, then consider one of the options Tiberius mentioned once you know how much power you will/won't need.