"The relentless nagging from partners to grow faster we throw in for free."
Is this sentence constructed poorly or did a private comment slip in?
$500k of Azure credit for YC startups
41–50 of 179 posts
Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups
#42Great offer.
I was accepted into Microsoft's BizSpark program last year so I get $150/month free Azure credit. Azure is very nice to use. So far, I have just been using Ubuntu Linux VPS instances (similar to AWS EC2) and everything works similarly to other providers I use like AWS, IBM BlueMix, Digital Ocean, and Google's cloud services. Really, these are all very good services, so use the one you can get for free or at a low cost.
I used to be pretty much down on Microsoft, but now they are doing a lot of stuff right in my opinion: providing solid Linux support on Azure and providing an unbelievably good deal on the family edition of Office365. It seems like they are buying themselves into the cloud market, but with all of their cash on hand, that seems like a good strategy!
Anyway, if you have a business idea you want to try then look into BizSpark.
Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups
#43Wow amazing, I am not the biggest Microsoft fan & I would never have what it takes to be part of a YC startup, yet just reading this got me all excited. This is truly great for those startups that qualify!
Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups
#44Makes the 1-year $100K credit by Google look not so good now.
Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups
#45Microsoft has been really trying to entice devs for the last few years. My experience with their cloud service has been terrible, although I haven't used it in a couple of years. It was seriously bad then, and some of their recent missteps haven't done much to change my mind. But MS is definitely trying, so I wonder if Google or AWS will respond to this latest move.
You might want to try again. I have been using Azure for about 6 months with no problems at all.
Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups
#46"ITS A TRAP!"
Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups
#47Great offer. I was accepted into Microsoft's BizSpark program last year so I get $150/month free Azure credit. Azure is very nice to use. So far, I have just been using Ubuntu Linux VPS instances (similar to AWS EC2) and everything works similarly to other providers I use like AWS, IBM BlueMix, Digital Ocean, and Google's cloud services. Really, these are all very good services, so use the one you can get for free or…
You can actually get $600/month in Azure credit. Your BizSpark account allows up to 4 users, and each gets $150/month.
EDIT: correction, it looks like it's actually 5 users: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/niallsblog/archive/2014/08/22/activa...
Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups
#48This is incredible! 500k is a big amount. Realistically speaking most startups would get free hosting for ~3 years out of this. For the future YC batches - depending on what your company is going to be doing, it would make very little financial sense to NOT host on Azure.
3 years of technical investment is pretty much enough to stop you leaving unless something goes very wrong. This $500k is a small price to pay for a client who goes on to be the next AirBNB or Dropbox. Even just the prestige of having a company like that to draw on for testimonials would justify the spend. However... For a startup to choose to build on Azure they'll need staff with MSFT stack experience. 5 or 6 of th…
I have made this comment before but I think that it bears repeating: Azure has good Linux support. I find little difference running Ubuntu VPS's on Azure that on other good platforms like AWS, Google, BlueMix, etc.
Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups
#49Microsoft has been really trying to entice devs for the last few years. My experience with their cloud service has been terrible, although I haven't used it in a couple of years. It was seriously bad then, and some of their recent missteps haven't done much to change my mind. But MS is definitely trying, so I wonder if Google or AWS will respond to this latest move.
Azure has been doing better. I've been using them for about 15 months now and the quality, uptime, speed, etc have all steadily improved. I haven't had an issue that was Azure's fault in quite some time now.
Re: $500k of Azure credit for YC startups
#50Microsoft is also giving YC startups three years of Office 365, access to Microsoft developer staff, and one year of free CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services. Free Office365 and CloudFlare are probably the best part of this announcement, since they are "easily migrate-able" by most startups. Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive. Even though they are negligible (in terms of money and value) th…
"Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive." Huh? You can run more or less the same type of services on Azure that you can on AWS. I wouldn't even consider DO due to lack of load balancers and file backup services.
Sure, but in practice if you have any complexity in your stack then it's going to be a PITA to from Azure to AWS (or vice-versa).
If you're just running instances then maybe it's not too much work - though you're still going to have to think about backup / restore, access control, autoscaling (maybe), cost tracking / allocation, etc...
I'm sure Microsoft are banking on a profitable percentage of YC companies becoming so wedded to that Azure systems that the opportunity cost of switching to AWS is too high.
Edit: Typo