Servers

[WinterHold]

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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.

You have a good point about both "Azure" and VPSs regarding the hardware: for the first you have Microsoft's guarantee that the servers used are new and strong, and VPS is quite new as a service.
But my point wasn't about the cost: it was about the people. I don't have a team so we can exploit the full features of Azure. Trying it would be for the sake of learning what it is from my side

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 If you want to keep things free, for example for a non-commercial site, I think Linux is easily the best platform.  But in my case, I need to be able to cobble together custom apps fast (in some cases an hour or two), be able to easily port them, and know that everything is going to just work well, whether it's on my dev computer, the server, or on a client's computer.

The best thing about Microsoft is how deeply everything is connected.  For example, from Excel macros, to Windows apps, to online code, I'm using mostly the same C# libraries.  I have access to every level of Microsoft service: Azure billing, hotmail account, One Drive storage, and so on.

I mean, if you're using C# and .NET code, then sure. However nothing you said above is any different on Linux using another programming language. Stuff like Ruby on Rails, Python (e.g. Django), or PHP frameworks all work just fine, in exactly the manner you've described.

one of the main reasons that made me choose Microsoft's "ASP.NET" and C# was the security. Any produced app/ web app will be very secured. PHP frameworks don't provide a very secured server side environment as far as I know. That's why banks use .NET

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I mean, if you're using C# and .NET code, then sure. However nothing you said above is any different on Linux using another programming language. Stuff like Ruby on Rails, Python (e.g. Django), or PHP frameworks all work just fine, in exactly the manner you've described.

Except that nobody has a computer with any of this already installed.  Almost everyone I know in Korea has access to at least one Windows-based computer.  I suspect for solo projects, I might find Linux more flexible than Windows in a lot of ways.  However, I couldn't for example throw an app on a download page and tell customers to download it.

I'm willing to bet that a lot of Linux stuff does its work better than Microsoft does.  But when taken as a whole body of work, I gotta feel that corporate synergy bringing everything together.

What are you talking about? Linux based operating systems invented the App Store:

But that's what I'm saying.  All Microsoft products are connected by that common thread.  I can either create C# scripts directly IN Office files, or I can use libraries built into .NET to access the files in my apps.  Other than that, I can use exclusively Microsoft solutions and custom-designed programs.  I don't have to wory about RoR, Python, PHP.  I don't have to look up documentation on a dozen different sites to figure out how a lot of 3rd party or indie stuff works.

Microsoft, essentially, is the one ring that rules them all.

I don't mean to be insulting.  I know that tech fights get out of control because people are so invested in their own framework.  A lot of it is probably just ignorance on my part.  However, I'm pretty sure I could do a Youtube video of me putting together a custom solution over a few hours, including deploying an app to customers, another app to run in the background on my server, and website code, that someone using Linux would have to take a lot more time on.

Another part of it is probably my age.  I'm a little shy of 50 now, and I learned most of my computing in earlier efforts to create computer games.  15 years ago or so, for me, that meant Windows programs written in c++ using either DirectX or OpenGL.

The Middle East is also dominated by Windows -literally from Saudi Arabia to the Levant; Egypt to Morroco- it's just windows. I haven't seen a mac os until 2012, when I bought my first mac. And in American movies.
I gave up chasing Game Programming after university and paid dearly; the game market is on fire now. But they need the servers and need the web programmers, so my choice wasn't that wrong