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Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

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Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#3

Post by goldenkey »

You got a bill because you went over the free tier. I've had the same thing and talked to Amazon and they wiped the bill and credited me with $200 worth of credit for the inconvenience and misunderstanding.

Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later. That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual Studio, other MS software, so when you are profitable, you pay them through the nose, because you are locked into proprietary anti-open-source bait.

You weren't diligent, and didn't even reach out to Amazon. Instead you went with a shitty competitor and we're supposed to applaud that? What's the moral here? That you're unable to reach out to a company when you feel like you were taken advantage of? Sorry, Azure is still garbage and AWS is one of the most advanced and performant cloud platforms available. Amazon still has the best support of any company in the consumer products and web services industry.

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#4

Post by shivaas »

goldenkey wrote: post #3

You got a bill because you went over the free tier. I've had the same thing and talked to Amazon and they wiped the bill and credited me with $200 worth of credit for the inconvenience and misunderstanding. Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later. That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual…

Spot on assessment. Ironically, the blog post felt like a MSFT sponsored post...

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#5

Post by shearnie »

I made the switch from AWS to Azure prior to being signed up with BizSpark. And from my experience is a a whole lot more bang for your buck for what you get even it you're just spinning up a bog standard VM. And might I add the AWS micro instance is pretty useless for anything besides having a tiny play. You'll never even have a test site working properly on t1.micro.

The other thing that swung me is the managed scaling for database and IIS in Azure where you just tweak a slider to allocate CPU's as required. Note this works for anything that can run on IIS such as PHP or Node or whatever not just for ASP.NET.

Now with Bizspark (and albeit fairly insignificant traffic for my startup) it's lots of bang for no bucks.

At least for three years until we get any decent traction and will get vendor lock in with MS and get stung by massive SQL licensing costs.

I know there's a lot of bad image for M$, but I honestly and optimistically believe that "Microsoft <3 Startups".

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#6

Post by tphan »

goldenkey wrote: post #3

You got a bill because you went over the free tier. I've had the same thing and talked to Amazon and they wiped the bill and credited me with $200 worth of credit for the inconvenience and misunderstanding. Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later. That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual…

Why is Windows Azure a terrible service?

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#7

Post by sdaityari »

goldenkey wrote: post #3

You got a bill because you went over the free tier. I've had the same thing and talked to Amazon and they wiped the bill and credited me with $200 worth of credit for the inconvenience and misunderstanding. Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later. That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual…

I did reach out to them, but they wiped only my current usage- I still had to pay the old bill in full. I contacted some people in Amazon who had helped others I know with free credits, but no one came forward to help me when I needed them the most. I had no choice.

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#8

Post by sdaityari »

goldenkey wrote: post #3

You got a bill because you went over the free tier. I've had the same thing and talked to Amazon and they wiped the bill and credited me with $200 worth of credit for the inconvenience and misunderstanding. Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later. That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual…

Another thing. BizSpark gives me a small instance- with two cores and 3.5 GB memory. And I can start another instance with half of that capability under the $150 per month I get. That is given to every small startup which enrolls in BizSpark. For 3 years!

Can Amazon beat that?

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#9

Post by sandGorgon »

goldenkey wrote: post #3

You got a bill because you went over the free tier. I've had the same thing and talked to Amazon and they wiped the bill and credited me with $200 worth of credit for the inconvenience and misunderstanding. Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later. That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual…

Actually, I would say the best cloud support comes from Rackspace. You actually get a phone call welcoming you and walking through the product, they have Cloud Advisors who will talk you through optimizing performance and if you pay 100$/month extra, someone who will configure and maintain nginx/mysql/haproxy/rails/django/etc.
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