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Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

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Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#61

Post by 300bps »

jessedhillon wrote: post #17
sdaityari wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, we all read the article. The question is not how does Microsoft's free giveaway compare to that of AWS' -- it's, how much will that cost you in three years, once you've committed yourself to using those resources. What are you going to do after that, sign up again with a different email address?

Azure is completely price-competitive with AWS. In fact, AWS and Azure seem to be in a pricing war, lowering their prices anytime the other one does. They're both far cheaper than Rackspace.

...and seriously - you're worried about pricing three years from now with a startup?

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#62

Post by 300bps »

noir_lord wrote: post #39

Tried to sign up for BizSpark about 18 months ago, small start-up business looking at developing a SaaS system. As a primarily linux web dev I still thought it worth seeing what the MS technologies might offer, they told me to bog off. So my entire company is and will be built around Debian/Apache/Postgres/PHP and Python for now and the foreseeable. (In actual fact it left such a bad taste in my mouth that all non de…

As a primarily linux web dev I still thought it worth seeing what the MS technologies might offer, they told me to bog off.

I keep seeing people post things like this and I cannot imagine how dumb someone has to be to get turned down for BizSpark. They are so amazingly clear in the rules of what you need:

1. A custom domain email address

2. Some semblance of a web site

I registered a domain name for $4, made a free Outlook.com email address on it and put up a "Coming Soon!" website. I then spent 5 minutes filling out the application. 4 days later I was approved with no follow up questions.

Now I get free Microsoft software for life (you keep your MSDN subscription licenses forever), free Azure hosting for three years and a ton of other benefits. For a $4 domain that I'll be using as a startup and about 10 minutes of my time.

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#63

Post by 300bps »

curiouscat321 wrote: post #13
shearnie wrote: post #5

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 scal…

Why would you need to pay SQL licensing costs? Couldn't you use their SQL storage platform (or Amazon's, or anybody else's)?

I've used it both ways. Using SQL licensing is much easier for someone already used to that. You can't do much with standard SQL tools (ex: Management Studio) while using an Azure SQL Database. You have to use the web interface. Backing up is different, restoring is different, designing tables is different. Copying databases from a local SQL instance to a SQL Azure is not straight-forward like copying a .bak file and restoring it and there are features in standard SQL that aren't supported in SQL Azure.

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#64

Post by sdaityari »

jessedhillon wrote: post #17
sdaityari wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, we all read the article. The question is not how does Microsoft's free giveaway compare to that of AWS' -- it's, how much will that cost you in three years, once you've committed yourself to using those resources. What are you going to do after that, sign up again with a different email address?

You see, 3 years is a long time to grow and a startup where the co founders are developers, I hope we can get enough revenue at least to pay the server bills!

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#65

Post by film42 »

rda_au wrote: post #54
cmircea wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look into the usage breakdown.

Seriously --- all the detail is right there. http://imgur.com/KXm8BHO And if you click "Download usage details", you get a csv of daily per-service usage data.

I'm sorry I didn't specify. I know how to check my usage, but my "next bill estimate" is only 11 cents. My total ends up somewhere between $1-3.

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#66

Post by nailer »

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 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 good, as I don't use any of those products.

The most 'Windows' I get is nodes process module returning some more Windowsy values when I use Azure Web Sites. Otherwise I don't care.

Oh yeah and Azure Web Sites doesn't support gulp (or even grunt) yet so I commit generated assets.

PS: is this really the #1 comment on Hacker News?

- If you've used Azure, you know it doesn't require MS languages or tools

- If you haven't used Azure, why are you upvoting this guy's conspiracy theory?

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#67

Post by sergiotapia »

3pt14159 wrote: post #10

Eh. Cloud66 + Digital Ocean is cheap enough. I'd rather go with someone that doesn't need marketing tricks to get me onto their servers.

Sorry for the bother, hopefully you can help me clear something up. Is Cloud66 a tool that I can use to set up a blank VPS?

I _can_ configure my own VPS (DigitalOcean) but it's a pain in the ass and it's always different for every box.

I've looked into Chef and it seems half-assed where recipes work on Ubuntu 12.04 x64 but not on Ubuntu 12.10 x86, you see? Fixes some problems, but just gives me other problems.

I want something where I can check some boxes and say give me a PostgreSQL database with this master username-password.

Configuring nginx for me with this folder as the root website container and install ruby 2.0.0 and rails. My needs are basic, but it's odd that nothing out there exists like this. PHP has XAMPP which install everything you need.

Re: Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

#68

Post by rescendent »

Maarten88 wrote: post #58

It's great that you can run Ubuntu VM's running Python/Django apps on Azure, as the author has done. However, I think you can get more out of Azure by using its PaaS services. It is also possible to run a Python/django app in an Azure Website Service. The cost is the same, but management and security if the OS is taken care of for you. Upgrades and patches happen automatically. You can setup automated build, test and…

Except Microsoft's "lock in" is lighter; if you build using AWS or Google tech; you are using proprietary tech that can only be hosted by them, which is a deep lock in.

If you build on Azure tech; you aren't locked into MS being the host of the services; you can run an Azure cloud entirely in your own datacenter; you can use Azure as overflow in a Hybrid model http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/solutions/hybrid... or if you have legal or compliance needs to not host with a US company you can use one of their many partners: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/dec13/12-12co... as the "Cloud OS" provider.

They even providing server and datacenter blueprints as part of the Open Compute Project http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/01/27... with datacenter rack management software, if you want to build your own datacenter.

All their client libraries are even on GitHub https://github.com/WindowsAzure

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