Azure versus AWS for webhosting

[RampantAndroid]

Hi all,

I'm currently trying to figure something out: I have about 4 sites I actively host right now, and I'm adding a website for my wedding to the mix right now. Through some weird set of problems, I'm thinking about dropping my current host: Dreamhost shared hosting. I've never been impressed, really...and now I'm just kind of done, given how little they cared about a problem with the hosting.

I'm a MSDN Ultimate subscriber, so I've been developing there using my credit....but I'm not totally convinced. I have no control without firing up a VM (I have no MySQL, and I work in the realm of PHP mostly so if I want to run any common systems, I'll need MySQL. Azure DOES have MySQL in the marketplace, but for $10 a month.

So here's the question: if I go the route of a VM, is AWS a better choice? I get a year free using the free tier, but that looks like it's limited to 1GB of RAM/1CPU and elastic band storage (I've read that if the VM reboots, you lose data????) Is 1CPU/1GB enough to run a handful of websites - a blog, a forum with a handful of users, a wedding website serving mostly static data...? Should I just take the hit to not having MySQL and only using PHP systems that support MS SQL and use Azure's easier web app setup?

If I go the VM route, can I have multiple domains served by a single VM?

Thanks!

 

[Train]

For web hosting it's important to consider Azure's other offering: Azure websites, which is like a cloud version of IIS. There's lot's of reasons why this is superior to trying to setup and maintain your own VM.

Downside is you'd have to get the database as a seperate service. with a Vm you can install MySql for free (more likely they already have a VM image with MySQL on it)

As far as comparison between Azure and AWS vm's go, I am personally not happy with the latency of either. I guess that's the trade-off for going cloud. Me and a coworker have been playing with both services for a while now. And I used other AWS and Azure services at my previous gig. It appears that Azure has more consistent speed, (close to 50ms on every request) while AWS can be faster, but will be slower at random times (between 30 and 150ms) these results we consistent across multiple data centers for each.

If the speed and consistency is not a problem, go with the cheaper one.

Overall, I think the hosting model of using a single cloud VM as a dedicated box is slightly sub par compared to just getting a dedicated box at a good host like SoftLayer. Where cloud really shines is when you need the number of VMs to change often. e.g one VM is fine now, but you want 20 an hour from now when traffic spikes. Then quickly shrink back to 1 as traffic wanes.

 

[h4rm0ny]

I am moving away from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which is managing all my own VMs just as if I had my own datacentre and all the headaches that go with it, and moving wherever possible to Platform as a Service (PaaS), which is "here is a database, here is a webserver, etc...." Once you get your mindset out of installing and maintaining those systems yourself and just accepting that they are there and using them directly, it's both more convenient and more robust. And DEFINITELY more scalable.

I don't have extensive experience on both, I do have some experience on both. I think if you're going IaaS then AWS is the more mature and perhaps slightly better service. If you're going PaaS then without question Azure, imo. It's a lot slicker and easy to work with. You also get end to end DevOps. Until you have used MS Visual Studio with Azure integration you have no idea how easy testing and deploying code can be.

 

[slugg]

I'm a Microsoft fanboy and I don't recommend Azure. I had bad experience after bad experience, including laughably bad tech support. But with Amazon, everything just worked. Pricing is a wash; it's so difficult to project costs without empirical data for your particular application.

The only reason to go with Azure is if you have free credit through MSDN. That's it. Put it to you this way; I have MSDN and I go ahead and pay for Amazon AWS, simply because the experience is just so bad on Azure. If your application needs any kind of disk IO whatsoever, Azure completely tanks. It's worthless, even with the so called "solid state" VMs. I was seriously getting seconds per IO, as opposed to IOPS. I escalated the issue and they assured me it was normal. Total garbage. I could get better performance out of a Gameboy.

I lied... there is one more reason why Azure might make sense. Their cost for MS SQL Server (Azure SQL) is cheaper than anyone else's. So if your app relies heavily on MS-SQL-Server-specific features, then that might be a viable solution.

 

[Markbnj]

I don't have any experience with Azure, but I run twenty or so instances on AWS so I can give you another data point there. Our experience gels with slugg's. 99.99% of the time everything just works. We make heavy use of docker so for almost all of our services it's literally two commands to launch a new instance: one to spin up the instance w/docker, and another to pull and run the image. We don't use all Amazon's services. We run haproxy rather than ELBs, for example. But to some extent it's fair to say that you get the most out of their platform when you're all-in. You're using AMIs, security groups, IAMs accounts and policies, etc. You can get bonded to the platform in lots of subtle ways, but overall there's no way we could replicate this setup on our own metal for the $1300/mo or so Amazon is costing us.

 

[Spydermag68]

The company I work for created a second test and development environments in AWS. After the launch of our environments we dialed back the services to get a better price for the performance we needed. We also added CHEF to help manage the servers in AWS and our production servers.