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Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

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Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#41

Post by herokusaki »

rdl wrote: post #11

I love BizSpark because it makes setting up new Windows VMs for testing (browsers, code deployment, etc.) pretty painless - you get at least 2 valid serial numbers for virtually every Microsoft product ever through the MSDN subscription, and you get to keep them after the MSDN expires. I'm also looking at doing some stuff with Windows Phone hardware (not with the OS, just the hardware...), so there's value in that. I…

> I'm also looking at doing some stuff with Windows Phone hardware (not with the OS, just the hardware...), so there's value in that.

Can you elaborate on that? AFAIK nothing but Windows Phone runs on WP8 hardware.

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#43

Post by orf »

quink wrote: post #24
rwg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. BizSpark giving away three years of $150/mo Azure credit is shady, but Amazon giving away one year of the free tier is not shady? That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual Studio, other MS software, so when you are profitable, you pay them through…

Embrace, extend, extinguish. Justified or not, Microsoft's history makes it hard for me to trust them. AWS have wiped over $2000 in excess charges incurred by one of our instances' data transfer - we set up an alert after that - they've been awesome to us and we trust them and are now spending more and more every month.

So they wiped some money you owed for data transfer that most likely cost them absolutely nothing. Big deal.

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#44

Post by herokusaki »

monkeyspaw wrote: post #34

Side point - it's likely you had many more "visitors" than the Bing Bot is the worst at this. They hammer my sites, send me zero traffic, and don't appear to allow me to control their behavior very well. I get 50x the traffic from google cmp to bing, but google is about 1/3 the hits (when looking @ raw logs).

That sounds awful. Can you block it through robots.txt? If not, and if Bing gives you no traffic, you could feed it blank (or just super truncated) pages based on the user agent.

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#45

Post by happywolf »

It always amuses me to see 1) people complain of the need to pay for a service 2) [more amusing point] the free stuff is not good enough. Beggars can't be choosers, if one wants something, earn enough and pay for it.

My solutions? There are two: 1) Work long enough to have reasonable amount of savings to fund my start-up, free stuff is nice, but they are sometimes risky. Reason being, how much leverage do you have when you didn't pay for something? 2) Be creative, there are always solutions out there. Writing an article to complain about a free service being not good enough really make me wondering if these 'entrepreneurs' are ready for the real world.

My start-up runs on a 512MB shared instance on $9/mth, and so far it meets my need.

BizSpark may have good perks, but it is beside the point.

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#46

Post by nl »

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'm an Apache committer, and because of that Microsoft gives me a free MSDN subscription (which includes Azure credits).

I use Azure to run assorted Ubuntu machines. They run well, the interface is nice and I have no complaints. I also have a few EC2 VMs (and some DigitalCloud VMs and some Rackspace VMs and in the past have had HP Cloud VMs and Linode VMs).

Amazon is good, too. But I signed up for EC2 before the free micro-tier came in, so I got nothing from them.

So what I want to know is why I should feel scared, running Ubuntu on Azure?

And what is wrong with giving Microsoft credit for offering good programs like Bizspark? (And read that first sentence again, BTW. That's a real thing, and no other company does that)

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#47

Post by cmircea »

film42 wrote: post #15
tphan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is Windows Azure a terrible service?

I signed up for the Azure trial program a while back, and I found the interface quite nice. About a week later I received a call from the Azure sales team asking if I would like to provision another MS SQL server -- I guess they looked into my billings. Anyways, I told the sales rep no thank you, and how I normally use linux machines for my startup. I asked if there were any promos for someone in my position, and the…

Look into the usage breakdown.

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#49

Post by bybjorn »

tarblog wrote: post #25
jtchang wrote: post #20

A bunch of you guys complaining about how BizSpark sucks...have any of you actually USED BizSpark and their free Azure offering? I've used it for a Windows server just to get stuff up and running that may not run on Linux. I've downloaded and used some of the free MS software. Give Microsoft some credit.

You don't give credit. You earn it.

You give somone credit if they have earned it.
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