Cost of hosting Wordpress sites on Azure with my own domains

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Intrigued by all the CP competition activity with Azure I decided to give the trial a go. I have been thinking about consolidating my various web hosting packages (3x Apache and 1x Windows) into one place, and this seemed like a viable plan.

I understand from the Websites->Configure page that "Custom domains can only be used when in the Shared or Standard modes.". I am presuming that to have anything other than mywebsitename.azurewebsites.net as the domain, this is what it is referring to.

I open the Pricing Calculator for Websites. I select Shared mode. I select a count of 4 websites. This quotes me $2700+ per annum. For 4 tiny Wordpress sites and that's it.

Am I doing something wrong, presuming something wrong or is it really that expensive to run 4 tiny sites with their own domain on Azure?

Thanks.

Posted 30-Jun-13 3:33am

Adam David Hill

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Valery Possoz 30-Jun-13 18:35pm

That seems quite expensive!... Did you look at the Standard rather than Shared option in the calculator, it mentions up to 500 websites. It does not calculate the price on the number of sites, but on the size and number of Virtual Machines. I guess 1 machine should be enough for you... It is still expensive at nearly $900 a year, but I guess you can run quite a few small sites from the VM.

Adam David Hill 30-Jun-13 19:09pm

I did, although I believe Shared is supposed to be cheaper. I'm beginning to think that the decimal place is wrong in the calculator's monthly summary. Incidentally, the prices appear to have changed since I originally entered it. It quotes £0.009 per hour or £47.35 per month for 1 website. At ~1 pence per hour with an average of 740 hours I'm pretty sure that should be ~£7.40 per month, which is actually reasonable.

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Adam David Hill · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-01T08:15:00

Received the following from the Azure Product Team, confirming that there is a bug in the Calculator, and that the price is realistic after all.

The pricing calculator is currently malfunctioning. I apologize for the confusion. Additional website pricing details are below.

The cost of your website depends on the tier (free, shred, or reserved) it is running in. When a web site is first created it runs in Free web site mode, meaning that it shares available compute resources with other subscribers that are also running web sites in Free mode. A web site configured to run in Free mode will provide somewhat limited performance when compared to other configurations. If a web site that is configured to run in a single instance using Free web site mode is put into production, the resources available to the web site may prove to be inadequate as the average number of client requests increases over time.

A web site in Shared mode is deployed in the same multi-tenant environment as one in Free mode, but has no quotas or upper limit to the amount of bandwidth it can serve and can offer better performance. A web site running in Shared mode also now supports the ability to receive mapping for multiple custom DNS domain names, using both CNAME and A-records. A shared website costs $9.36/month.

A reserved website has its own dedicated server. A web site that is configured as Reserved will provide more consistent performance than a web site that is configured as Free or Shared. You can run all of your websites on the same reserved VM. When you configure a web site as Reserved, you specify the size of the web server (Small, Medium or Large). A small reserved VM will cost 57.60 per month. Medium is $115 and Large is $230/month.

Additional information on the tiers of websites (free, shared, and reserved) and how to scale between them can be found here: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/services/web-sites/how-to-scale-websites/

There is also a bandwidth charge with websites. You pay for egress bandwidth. All inbound data sent to Windows Azure is free. Outbound data is charged based on the total amount of data moving out of the Windows Azure datacenters via the Internet in a given billing cycle. There is also a charge for SQL Database. That is dependent on the size of your database. 4 shared sites should cost $37.44 plus outbound bandwidth and a database charge.

You can plug your bandwidth estimates and database size into the pricing calculator to get an idea of the corresponding charge: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?scenario=web