Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

blogs.msdn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 149 posts

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#51

Post by keithwarren »

city41 wrote: post #26
iambateman wrote: post #10

I've used Azure's cloud hosting in production for a half dozen sites and I have to say it's driving me nuts. We tried to flip DNS to Azure and it wouldn't resolve. It took our senior developer two days of talking to Azure support to solve. Ended up being their fault. Today I ported some work using PHP's mail() function, which evidently Azure doesn't support? This is probably our own fault for switching environments b…

I've had some issues with Azure too and have fought it a bit. My app is Node/Postgres based. I'm pretty positive if I had developed a C#/SQL Server app, then Azure would be almost entirely smooth sailing. I can't really blame MS for targeting their own tech first. Node, PHP and the like are not quite as first class citizens in Azure yet.

I never had trouble with any .net stack stuff but when i tried node I had some issues. Ultimately I used the MS tooling to provision the site the first (webmatrix) and from then on everything was fine.

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#52

Post by nl »

sytelus wrote: post #47

I still don't know why people find these "low" prices exciting. A most minimum spec VM in cloud still costs $380 per year . Considering these providers have advantage of scale plus load balancing ability, the cost should be 1/10th of this. I was looking for new host for my site and after I looked at Azure/AWS, I was floored how expensive these things are. Cloud prices had been riding in clouds for quite sometime. It…

A most minimum spec VM in cloud still costs $380 per year.

Not sure where you are getting that. On Azure, it is $1612=$192/year[1]. If your "in cloud" means other large providers as well, Digital Ocean will do it for $512=$60/year[2].

If you are prepared to go with smaller providers, then a very quick look around finds providers at $5/year[3].

I've worked on pricing at a large (enterprise) hosting company and I can assure you the "low margin" claim isn't "pure bullshit".

The fact is that all of these people could have lowered their prices for quite sometime but they just chugged along until there was competitive pressure. Eventually, someone will become monopolist in this area and they would have free ride and all of these guys are in game to become that monopoly.

Don't these two claims conflict with each other? Prices are dropping because of competitive pressure. If someone will become monopolist in this area AND margins are as high as you seem to think, won't it be simple for another provider to enter the market with slightly lower prices and take market share from the incumbent monopolist?

[1] http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-ma...

[2] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/

[3] http://lowendbox.com/

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#54

Post by [deleted] »

sytelus wrote: post #47

I still don't know why people find these "low" prices exciting. A most minimum spec VM in cloud still costs $380 per year . Considering these providers have advantage of scale plus load balancing ability, the cost should be 1/10th of this. I was looking for new host for my site and after I looked at Azure/AWS, I was floored how expensive these things are. Cloud prices had been riding in clouds for quite sometime. It…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#55

Post by shuffle2 »

davidbanham wrote: post #45

FYI, Azure runs Linux but does so on a Windows host. Whenever Windows needs a security update, it has to be rebooted. This means you need to plan for your Linux VM to go down weekly.

It's monthly, however even that isn't really acceptable. So far I've been too lazy to figure out if one can setup the live migration stuff to act as workaround for this...not sure. It's definitely something they should at least address / give an official workaround for, or preferably just transparently handle it.

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#56

Post by nl »

yulaow wrote: post #8
lelandriordan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. MS said that they would match any AWS price change.

We have to hope they never form a sort of cartel or join an informal alliance. Until now we are really getting a lot of benefits due to this competition

If that were to happen there is nothing stopping new market entrants from quickly gaining market share simply with lower prices.

DigitalOcean has done this to some extent (although it is unclear how much of their pricing relies on venture funding and generous payment terms for hardware/data centers space combined with rapid growth.)

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#57

Post by shuffle2 »

leddt wrote: post #49
davidbanham wrote: post #45

FYI, Azure runs Linux but does so on a Windows host. Whenever Windows needs a security update, it has to be rebooted. This means you need to plan for your Linux VM to go down weekly.

In my experience (running a Windows vm) the forced reboot is more like every two months. Also they have a feature called availability sets where you can load balance two VMs and they guarantee that one of them will always be up. Edit: Looking back at my email history, it's much less often than that. The interval between the previous two reboots was 6 months. They also gave about two weeks notice when it happened.

I just had this happen recently and there was no warning. Perhaps it depends on the "level" of services you are using. My instance was just an "extra small" vm.

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#59

Post by marshray »

iambateman wrote: post #10

I've used Azure's cloud hosting in production for a half dozen sites and I have to say it's driving me nuts. We tried to flip DNS to Azure and it wouldn't resolve. It took our senior developer two days of talking to Azure support to solve. Ended up being their fault. Today I ported some work using PHP's mail() function, which evidently Azure doesn't support? This is probably our own fault for switching environments b…

If you (or anyone in the this thread) would be so kind as to write up a description of some specific functionality or interactions that we can improve and email them to me (m/a/r/a/y at microsoft dotcom) I would appreciate it. I can't promise instant gratification results, but I will do my best to get your feedback to the right person.

Thanks :-)

Re: Microsoft Azure: Cutting prices on compute and storage

#60

Post by nl »

davidbanham wrote: post #45

FYI, Azure runs Linux but does so on a Windows host. Whenever Windows needs a security update, it has to be rebooted. This means you need to plan for your Linux VM to go down weekly.

This isn't correct.

Azure uses HyperV[1] as their virtualization technology. That isn't the same as Windows at all, although it is included in Windows Server.

While I have had more reboots on Azure than on AWS, it isn't weekly by any means - more like every 3 months or so. It hasn't been often enough for it to be a problem (low usage environment though, so YMMV).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-V#Microsoft_Hyper-V_Serve...

Post reply on HN