I signed up for an Azure account today.  It would be an excellent platform for cross University and Business opportunities.  In the cloud – scalable – increase/decrease resources as needed.

From a small business perspective, I need to look at costs.  My current provider is a shared, single server solution.  I looked at it from a perspective that I maxed out my current totals.  This may not be a fair comparison, since I don’t max them out each month.

My source for the Azure costs: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/ 

Looking at the numbers, just the disk space is over 3 times the cost.  I’m sure the provider has many customers that don’t even come close to their max limits – thus the reason they can offer such a deal.  I’ve been with my provider for over 4 years with only one downtime (just minutes).  I have two services tracking downtime for me.  SQL Azure has a Web Edition with up to 1 GB for $9.99/month – still more than my current hosting package.

Please review my calculations and let me know if I’m wrong.  Send me your thoughts and any metrics I’m leaving out.  I know… Azure is clustered with guaranteed uptimes; I need to look at usage to get a true result on costs/month. 

I’m going to test out Azure with VS 2010.  Stay tuned for my feedback.