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Comment by brendanp | Hacker News Reader

I don't have much insight into Azure pricing, unfortunately. You need the bigger disk with the standard tier A1 for your app/service?

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No, the disk is fine. I just wish that VM cost $20, perhaps $25, but not $57 which it costs now (I've corrected my original post, it was not $67 but $57 as I remembered wrongly).

I wish to publish a relatively simple app for a reasonable price and I'm sadly skipping Azure from my consideration. I'm seeing VMs similar to A1 cost about $12-15 with many hosting companies. And for $20-25 I can get your level A2 which costs $115.

I realize you may not be in a position to influence pricing. I just would like to point out that the pricing of Azure VMs is not simply uncompetitive, but plainly prohibitive. I hope Microsoft does something about it.

Saying it as a veteran Microsoft developer since the 90s.

I think the lowest entry point for this is an A0, which offers an admittedly very small (half an A1) VM for 9.98 euro a month. Good to start off with, and if you build your application slightly differently you can actually run it on two machines, total power is the same, with only the communication overhead between them which luckily isn't that high if you put them in the same region. I find that I can run a very decent amount of software on Azure for a very very low price, but sometimes I needed to make certain architectural changes (for example using Cloud Services + Table Storage + Service Bus instead of VM's and SQL Server makes the whole system very cheap).

A very nice thing that NServiceBus does on Azure is giving the opportunity to have multiple endpoints hosted in the same Cloud Service [1]. Taking this mindset, for small applications, you can build it so when needed (and presumably when money is also less of a thing since you need more), you can scale out easily, but when just starting up you can do it super cheap. This depends a lot on your application though, but for example the Topshelf framework [2] can help a lot.

I'm not affiliated with either Microsoft or NServiceBus, but I am an avid user of both and really love the ecosystem, including the pricing ;)

[1] http://docs.particular.net/nservicebus/azure/shared-hosting-...

[2] https://github.com/Topshelf/Topshelf

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