LUKE PUPLETT

Following on from my last posting about the cost of running an Azure hosted little website I have done some more calculations.

As it turned out, my previous favourite, Fido.net had run out of servers and wanted more money than I was prepared to part with for the next rung up the server ladder.

Previously, I had toyed with the idea of running my own server. I can do this with Fido but they want me insured, and when I spoke to insurance people, they said that it was a waste of time as it would be incumbent on the OEM of the server that set fire to the building.

Redstation do co-lo and its cheap. You get a 100Mbit line and around 4Tb traffic cap, a 1U space in the rack and 8 IP addresses (5 usable), 24/7 access and free tea and coffee from the machine.

Couple them with a little server built here and I could be onto a sure fire value winner.

A custom PCN built 1U server with my own added reliable SSD drive will set me back $775. That's a quad core box with 8Gb RAM.

I can also load it up with my own BizSpark licensed software, which is not an option when you rent a server. Plus I can add another server some day and split out the SQL duties – although I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let's see how it all stacks up. Sorry for the micro text.

Unless I’m mistaken, and the point of a blog is much to do with airing thoughts so that others can give theirs, Windows Azure is exceptionally bad value.

I’m now using the Compute time as “time in existence” of the VM. And when the VMs are so puny, and the price is so large, 7p an hour for 1.6Ghz and 1.75Gb RAM, its not good.

When I first looked at Microsoft’s Azure platform, I thought it spelled the end for traditional hosters. Evidently not. I thought it was a low barrier to entry way for mobile app makers to get their apps into the cloud.

They have missed the opportunity to be truly disruptive in this market and charge a base rate plus the amount you use. Being MS, they own the OS and have the power to really accurately charge by utilisation, and auto provision at times or duress. At the moment, the value proposition is in the quick provisioning of servers and would benefit a company that gets massive influxes of traffic for short periods, like ticket sales.

Anyway, this is as much about Azure as it is about hosting options for a small website/service, and so it now looks like building a cheap server and paying for the rack space is the most cost-effective solution.

Until I sign a contract though, it could change. One thing that rented boxes provide is a little more peace of mind from driving down to the chilled room with a screwdriver at 2am. Although from my experience, hardware doesn’t fault that easily and its almost always a dodgy spindle.

With SSD drives, I hope to eliminate that.

Please read the comments. This was written before I confirmed that Azure compute time is uptime, not CPU time actually used.

I have another post written after establishing the above fact.

As with any cost planning, a load of assumptions have to be made about capacity and requirements. In the ordinary world of hosting, this means basically wondering if you'll use all the RAM on the supplied box or not, but with the Windows Azure model so granularly broken down, it makes it slightly more trifling.

Azure has prices for storage transactions as well as for things like AppFabric Access Control transactions and Service Bus connections. For the sake of my planning I have conveniently pretended that they're not there in a sort of ignorance is bliss line of thinking. Well, I actually don't think I'll use this stuff for my project, yet.

I'll delay no longer and get to the interesting part. For £129.22 I'll be getting an equivalent of a 1Ghz processor running at full chat for a month, as well as 1Mbit of full chat bandwidth, 0.1Mbit incoming and 50Gb storage used. Oh and not forgetting 10Gb of SQL Azure - 1Gb being really rather too measly for anyone's use of a full blown RMDBS.

What's perhaps interesting is that MS don't seem to charge for extra RAM. To access more RAM you take a bigger instance with more processors, but if your workload is the same the clock cycles will cost the same, albeit spread over more cores.

For comparison's sake here's a similar costing scenario I did with a bunch of hosting companies in and around the UK. Stop squinting.

The company I has previously chosen was Fido.net which charges about £100p/m for a dedicated dual core box with a single 500Gb HDD and Windows and SQL Server 2008. They give you 2Mbit for about £30p/m which equates to around 600Gb in/out data and 5% of your time you can be bursting to full 100Mbit.

Fasthosts might work out cheaper and CloudHosts have a very good reputation but little Fido.net was setup by an ex colleague and while I don't get mate's rates, I do feel that his small company won't have a saturated network and a lack of care for any woes I might run into.

And regarding that bandwidth, most companies give an unmetered 100mbps mbit (whatever) connection and say that its shared but also that "no one has ever come near to rinsing it" - which makes me think that 1Mbit might probably suffice in my situation and thus the amount assumed in my Azure scenario.

Half Conclusion

Fido.net's £100 + £30 is very much like Azure's £129 and so this leaves me in a quandary. I could go with Azure and its instant scalability and other features to plug into etc. but that £130 in the Fido purse gives me much more than what I get with Azure, if I choose to use it. Remember that with Azure I'm pricing that exact usage, whereas with the others, there's a lot more room left before I need to buy and bigger or another dedicated server.

If I were to compare the cost of a fully utilised dedicated server with Azure, the dedicated box would win hands down. And therein lies the rub: those damned usage assumptions.

Mostly though, I am put off by that SQL Azure price; £60p/m for 10Gb when normal hosters will dish out the whole server and SQL Server with the freedom to fill the whole disk with a 250Gb database if you so desire.

I hope this gives someone food for thought, even if my costings aren't terribly scientific.

P.S. Doesn't factor in the 'offers' that Microsoft have for new joiners, which are about 50% off for 6 months ish.

Posted on Channel 9 this morning was a short 5 minute video showing a number of prototype mice that replace the wheel and buttons with touch/finger/whole hand sensors.

Given that holding our arms out in front of us to touch our screens all day will be prohibitively hard to sustain for 11 hours in the office, the future has to be some variation on the desktop pointing device or trackpad.

Check it out (and enjoy the bleepy futuristic music):

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/LarryLarsen/This-May-Be-Your-Next-Mouse/

“The floor plan above shows the main blocks in Nehalem, and if you've followed previous Nehalem launches (most notably Bloomfield) then you may be able to spot what's missing: there is no QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) interface. Instead, in a significant twist that differentiates Intel's new PC system architecture from even AMD's offerings, there is now a PCIe interface that enables the GPU to attach directly to the processor socket. This latter move was made in anticipation of two things: 1) the GPU will migrate right into the processor socket at a later point when Intel releases a CPU with an on-die GPU integrated into it, and 2) for a discrete GPU, Intel hopes you'll use Larrabee.”

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/09/intel-launches-all-new-pc-architecture-with-core-i5i7-cpus.ars

Arguably off-topic I couldn't help posting this demo of a game called RUSE. It exploits Microsoft's $12,500 Surface computer to the fullest that I've seen so far with a war strategy game called RUSE. For me, touch and robotics are set to be the two most disruptive innovations for years.

Now I haven't played games since discovering girls but for a number of years I've felt that, in terms of enjoyment, games are more consistent. Seriously though, I think we can all learn alot from the games industry, especially since technologies like WPF and Silverlight have delivered such a rich toolset (3D and touch) to the LOB and web developer.