Despite the conflicting belief, hosting a website on the cloud is a great option for businesses and individuals alike. In this post, we will be talking about Azure web hosting pricing to host a website on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
Azure is no doubt one of the top cloud services providers available in the market today. It’s similar in ranks of Amazon AWS. Microsoft Azure provides a simple way for businesses and people alike to host their websites and application.
Introducing Azure web hosting and its advantages over other hosting providers?
Recently known as Windows Azure, Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s public cloud computing system. It presents a wide array of cloud services such as networking, storage, analytics, and computer. Users can choose and select from such services to create and scale new applications or run current public record applications.
The Azure platform strives to help organizations deal with challenges and meet their business goals. It provides supports and tools to every industry, including finance, e-commerce, and some Fortune 500 companies, and currently compatible with open-source technologies.
That offers users the versatility to utilize their preferred technologies and tools. Azure provides four different types of cloud computing: SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, and serverless.
Before jumping to Azure web hosting pricing details, let’s see some benefits of Microsoft Azure. Here are some of the benefits of using Azure than other platforms for your business:
- It provides high availability
- It provides a strong security profile
- Delivers excellent scalability choices
- It offers different redundancies in place to keep data access
- Enables you to use any tool, language, or framework
- You get access to app connectors in the Microsoft products family
Top 5 reason why your website should be hosted on Azure
Keep in mind that not all cloud solutions available today are made the same. Below are the top five reasons more businesses and individuals are opting to Microsoft Azure.
- Flexibility
Azure is 100% flexible and offers the user the option to use any functionality level they need. It supports the same technologies most IT specialists and developers already depend on. One can easily deploy and change their Web apps to Azure without any downtime.
- Cost
Azure web hosting pricing structure provides a pay-as-you-go payment plan allowing users to control their IT budgets as they buy only what they currently need. Further, using Azure to maximize SaaS applications lowers your IT management’s cost of maintenance, infrastructure, and management.
- Disaster recovery
Azure also provides end-to-end disaster recovery and backup solution which is cost-efficient, scalable, secure, and simple. It can easily be incorporated with on-premises data protection solutions too.
- Security
Azure offers some of the most advanced security technology within the industry. Hence, you can be at ease your data is protected. Your Azure environment is sheltered with tools such as Multi-Factor Authorization, Threat Intelligence Azure Information Protection, and Advanced Threat Analytics.
- Scalability
Azure offers high redundancy and scalability due to Microsoft’s massive global footprint. The platform can present service level agreements ensuring a 99.95% uptime. That amounts to less than 5 hours of downtime every year!
What are the types of web hosting available on Azure?
Azure currently offers two different types of web hosting on their platform: Static and Dynamic web hosting. Take a closer look:
- Static Web Hosting
Would you like to host a static website on Azure? Then you need to spend at least $0.5 to $2 every month. In case you didn’t know, a static website only requires bandwidth and storage. That indicates you can easily get away with small charges.
- Dynamic Website Hosting
On the other hand, there’s Dynamic web hosting too. This website needs more resources. Thus, Azure web hosting pricing is more than static website hosting.
Any website running dynamic content would need server-side code. You can utilize Azure App Service to begin. Are you seeking shared infrastructure? Lucky for you because you can receive ten free websites, but remember they are limited to CPU and storage.
That can cost you at least $50 or more every month. As you can tell, the free tier will not cut, and you need to look for other tiers such as basic, standard, and more.
What are Different pricing and service plans for Azure web hosting
Aside from the free tier available, Azure still provides more when we talk about hosting a website. The Free plan offers you ten websites, mobile or API apps, and a 1G disk space.
- Basic Plan
The basic service plan is perfect for apps or websites with very minimal traffic. Take note that it does not support auto-scale. However, it provides basic traffic management features. The price of a basic plan depends on the resources you need.
| Instance | Cores | RAM | Storage | Price |
| S1 | 1 | 1.75 GB | 50 GB | $0.10 per hour |
| S2 | 2 | 3.50 GB | 50 GB | $0.20 per hour |
| S3 | 4 | 7 GB | 50 GB | $0.40 per hour |
- Premium Plan
The premium plan is intended for apps and websites that need top-notch service.
| Instance | Cores | RAM | Storage | Price |
| P1v2 | 1 | 3.50 GB | 250 GB | $0.20 per hour |
| P2v2 | 2 | 7 GB | 250 GB | $0.40 per hour |
| P3v2 | 4 | 14 GB | 250 GB | $0.80 per hour |
- Isolated Plan
This Azure web hosting pricing plan is perfect for those apps and websites that get millions of viewers or visitors every month.
| Instance | Cores | RAM | Storage | Price |
| I1 | 1 | 3.50 GB | 1 TB | $0.40 per hour |
| I2 | 2 | 7 GB | 1 TB | $0.80 per hour |
| I3 | 4 | 14 GB | 1 TB | $1.60 per hour |
Azure also provides other services you may need to run your site. For instance, you can obtain a domain from them at $11.99 per year. It also has privacy protection features. Apart from that, you can get SSL certification for only $69.99 per year. The platform also provides a Wildcard SSL certificate that is available for only $299.99 per year.
SSL Plans from Microsoft Azure hosting
| SSL | $69.99 / Year |
| Wildcard SSL | $299.99 / Year |
Role of Azure storage for website hosting
Website owners need to consider how much website hosting storage their website is going to be used. That’s because it will cost them more cash to run the website if it’s massively loaded with content. That must be considered if creating a business plan, given that the revenue produced by the website should outweigh any outgoings like this.
Furthermore, using a higher amount of disk storage can lower the website’s functionality. That’s another crucial thing to consider, as there’s no point in adding media if it will make the rest of the website’s aspects clunky and awkward.
Static website hosting in Azure Storage
Did you know that hosting your website in Azure Storage allows us to utilize serverless architectures that involve Azure Functions and other PaaS services? The good thing about Azure Storage for a static website is that it’s an excellent alternative if you don’t need a webserver to render your content. The Azure web hosting pricing for a static website is also affordable for many organizations that are just starting out in business.
Steps to host a static website on Azure web hosting
Would you like to host a static website on Azure web hosting? Feel free to follow the steps below to help you get started:
- Turn on static website hosting
- Sign in to the Azure portal.
- Find your storage account and check your account overview.
- Choose a Static website to show the configuration page for static sites.
- Click Enabled to allow static website hosting.
- Select a default index page in the Index document name field.
- Select a default error page in the Error document path field.
- Choose Save.
- Upload your files
- Choose Storage Explorer (preview).
- Enlarge the BLOB CONTAINERS node and click the $web container.
- Pick Upload to start uploading your files.
- Would you like the browser to show the file content? Ensure the content type of that file is on text/HTML.
- Locate the website URL
- Choose Static Website in the pain that shows beside the account overview page of your account. The URL of the website shows in the Primary endpoint section.
- Allow metrics on static website pages
- Choose Metrics below the Monitor section of your storage account menu.
- Choose the time frame button, select a time frame and click the Apply button.
- Click Blob from the drop down Namespace.
- Click Engress metric.
- Choose Sum from the Aggregation selector.
- Pick Add filter and click API name from the Property selector.
- Click the box close to GetWebContent under the Values selector to populate the metrics report.
EPCGroup approach and best practices
At EPCGroup, we’ve been using Azure for a few years and providing Azure consulting to organizations. As we want to say and leverage different Azure services, we’ve grown up with the platform and spend a small fortune on it each day. Some tips we can lower your costs include:
- Reduce your actual Azure prices
- Determine what your existing costs are
- Simplify and optimize how you deploy the apps you use
- Enhance the performance of your app
- Monitor your performance and usage of all application dependencies
- Optimize SQL database performance
- Stop utilizing Cloud Services Web Roles unless it’s really needed
- Mix web apps along with Azure App Services Plans to lower server count
Conclusion
Are you currently running Widows? Then Azure’s cloud hosting solutions is something you’d like to utilize. Organizations using other OS can also enjoy the many advantages of the platform. They provide a high price for their features, so it may not be perfect for start-up or individual companies with modest budgets.
