We had a conversation with our BizSpark manager and you can also apply for BizSpark plus. This needs an additional review of your Startup, but if you succeed you get 10.000$ (or 15.000$ - not sure anymore) in Azure credits every month.
Quite nice to get some traction at the beginning :-)
Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme
71–80 of 98 posts
Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme
#72How about Google App Engine for startups? They give a free tier, which I presume is free for life as long as the web application stays within quota. Ofcourse there is lock-in, there is no free lunch anywhere! But it should be ok for startups with no capital, who just want to figure out their business model. Once the idea is validated, they can always learn from the experience, and rewrite the application if platform…
One thing that Azure and EC2 gives that Google App Engine does not is root access to VMs. Modifying my models with respect to the App Engine doesn't really seem like a good idea. Maybe I am too lazy to do that, but I just don't want to leave something that gives me a whole new machine on the cloud!
Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme
#73It's even better - you get an MSDN subscription for up to 10 people, each with $150 Azure credits ($200 first month) and you can use all of them in production. That's $1500.
Yes, that's something I haven't tried and it's a luxury that this startup doesn't really need now.
Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme
#74You might not like it after 3 years when you're deeply tied into their software/services and you realise how expensive it can be...
Its not that expensive; you get a discount for a further 2 years and if after 5 years you aren't making enough money to afford your licences you might just want to start a new company and re-enroll.
And that's not being able to afford your licences that you are using beyond the program: "BizSpark Alumni can keep, at no charge, all the software they downloaded during their three years in the program, including a standard configuration of Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server."
It would suggest you are doing something wrong if you can't afford what ever extra licences, you need to use passed this and 5 years on...
Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme
#75You 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 hack node, on a Mac, using Sublime. I use both AWS and Azure, and they're both fantastic and terrible: - Azure has better, more polished web management, AWS is more flexible - Azure gives 500s, 404s and 403s occasionally, AWS has outage IDs that don't appear in their status page and has useless support even when you pay for it. Either way, I don't feel locked into Windows or Visual Studio when using Azure, which is…
I think HN, much like Slashdot, loves to hate on MS.
Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme
#76You 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 had a similar incident where my free tier went over some restriction and charged me. Amazon wiped it out after one single email from me. And I got some free credits. Amazon's support is second to none, in any area. I have no experience with azure to make a comment but anything that uses microsoft tech is just not going to work for me, free or paid.
Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme
#77You might not like it after 3 years when you're deeply tied into their software/services and you realise how expensive it can be...
If you can't afford their software or services after 3 years than the problem is that your startup never became a real business.
The BizSpark program is intended for people trying to launch new businesses (hence the name). It's not intended for hobby projects or side projects.
Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme
#78You 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…
Amazon billed me ~$40 for debugging their service (problem: micro instances become completely unreachable after a few minutes, suggested course of action: spin up a few instances, tell us which ones they are, and we'll have a look). This does not seem like good support.
Two last paid support cases were closed after they identified a bug in their code and we found a more elegant fix than the hack suggested by them. We still had to pay for both.
I'm not impressed with aws support so far. Especially Elastic Beanstalk. Looking into OpsWork to take matters in my own hands.
Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, I would say the best cloud support comes from Rackspace. You actually get a phone call welcoming you and walking through the product, they have Cloud Advisors who will talk you through optimizing performance and if you pay 100$/month extra, someone who will configure and maintain nginx/mysql/haproxy/rails/django/etc.
I wanted to try Rackspace but needed more than a single IP and couldn't wait for their approval process. This is where AWS shines...
That's my experience with Rackspace. They're fairly inflexible in what they offer, and it's a bit of a pain to go outside of their standard offerings, but if you can work within their limits then they offer truly unparalleled service even for tiny 'insignificant' customers.
Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How many other companies do you think would do that?