- Compare hosting plans.
- Scenarios and recommendations.
- Feature comparison
Azure Websites
- Choose Azure Websites 99% of the time (Scott Guthrie)
- Very little responsibility, but less control (relatively)
- Support most popular web development frameworks (also non-Microsoft).
- Frictionless deployment from VisualStudio or FTP. Deploy in seconds, host for free. Very l
- You get very much out of the box: pay for use, monitoring, no hardware outages, scaling, no backups, no Windows updates.
Virtual machines
- You have total control, but you have all the responsibility.
- Setting up IIS, application pools, user accounts, file/folder permissions, access control, patches/hotfixes
Cloud services
- Original cloud-based hosting option from Microsoft with web roles and worker roles.
- You can use remote desktop and msi installers.
- Differences with VM’s:
- Out-of-the-box you have a staging environment and a production environment (virtual IP swap -> makes staging environment the production environment. Old production environment becomes the staging environment).
- Automatic OS update management (hotfixes/patches).
- Seamless platform switching (32-bit, 64-bit), but normally you always use 64 bit.
- You can’t use FTP, webdeploy, no deploy from Git.
There’s no specific pricing difference if you use comparable scaling.