Introduction
Last night I started playing around with Node.js, and since I’m on Windows, the only decent choice for almost any supported language was Visual Studio. Then I started looking for where to put my Node.js website. I found out that, among others, MS Azure supports it too, and since I had heard quite a lot about it but still hadn’t fully understood what it is actually good for, I wanted to give it a try.
Now I know that Node.js could probably run on just about any ASP.NET hosting, especially after arranging it with the provider. I signed up, and right there Chrome “went on strike“, because the payment details could only be entered in Internet Explorer. But then I somehow forgot about that trouble, assumed everything would be fine from then on, and tried Chrome again.
It took a good half hour before I “found out once again” that the MS Azure websites don’t work properly in Chrome. From then on I used only IE for them. I created one SQL Database, because it seemed to me it would be a SQL Server database. I know that MS Azure also supports other databases, mainly MySQL and Hadoop, and those are probably activated under Storage or somewhere else.
Or maybe Storage is just classic file storage, but I don’t think so after taking a “quick look” at the administration.
Prices
I started the trial and they gave me 150EUR (the equivalent of 200USD) in credit. I now have only 148.7EUR left. 1.23EUR was eaten up by an application that isn’t even running now, and it had just 1 file, plus 0.07 for the database. I used the database for 0.63 days. With MS Azure you pay for every minute you use it, which is a new approach and one I don’t really like.
If I’m paying for something, I want it to be unlimited. Transferring 0.5GB of data into the database was free. The database is B0, the lowest tier of Basic, with a size of 2GB. That is exactly what impressed me the most at first. After all, at Aspone I can have only 0.45GB and I pay 181 CZK a year for it, while here they want a slightly lower amount of 120 CZK a month for 2GB.
But all that glitters is not gold. Either I would keep paying for hosting at ASPone so I’d have a place for my files, which would multiply my expenses, or I would move everything to Azure, which might be even worse. Just look at it: the application runs for a day, maybe 10 people visit that 1 small page, and it immediately “gobbles up” 1.23EUR. So this is the worse option of the two.
I simply think that all those big clouds (Amazon, Azure, Google) are only for bigger companies, because for them the options the clouds offer can pay off. For individuals and personal projects, some local hosting options are definitely more suitable. Or it’s for those who need detailed statistics on every CPU operation on the server, the database, every error and so on :).
Conclusion
What an idiot I am. I tried to copy into Azure my entire database hosted at ASPOne, which has over a million rows, and that’s not even counting all the websites yet: https://cl.ly/bjKv . All of that just to find out whether the Azure DB would be faster, instead of optimizing my web application and not looking for alternatives.
First the classic way, row by row. When I realized it was going nowhere, I uploaded up to 2099 parameters (table cells) at once, which is the maximum limit of SQL Server. But then there was another problem: SQL Server took a long time to process the data. Really pointless work.
I need to put some work into my website again, not wait a week for my database to transfer. That’s why I gave up on it. I hope I’ve learned my lesson and that I’ll never come up with such nonsense again, although that’s probably just wishful thinking, because I’m simply overflowing with silly and curious ideas.
I do pay a lot at ASPone, but what can you do. It’s the price I pay for being able to use ASP.NET, and for the fact that there isn’t much competition in ASP.NET hosting here, because these days even “Joe from the garage next door” runs PHP hosting. And if I don’t like it, I can go off to the aforementioned PHP!