An hour of small computing time: 0,12$ per hour
A Gig of storage in the cloud: 0,15$ per hour
1 Gig of relational database using Azure SQL: 9,99$ per month
A Visual Studio Professional with MSDN Premium account: 2500$ per year
Winning an MSDN Professional account that comes preloaded with 750 free hours of Azure per month: PRICELESS !!!
But was it really free???? Hmmm… Let’s see.....
Here's a few things I learned regarding Azure billing policies when I attended a promotional training at Microsoft last week...
1) An instance deployed in the cloud really means whatever you upload in there... it doesn't matter if it's in STAGING OR PRODUCTION!!!! Your MSDN account comes with 750 free hours of small computing time per month which should be enough hours per month for one instance of one application deployed in the cloud... So we're cool, the application you run in the cloud doesn't cost you a penny.... BUT the one that's in staging is still consuming time!!! So if you don’t want to end up having to pay 42$ at the end of the month on your credit card like this happened to a friend of mine, DELETE them staging applications once you’ve put them in production! This also applies to the instance count you can modify in the configuration file… So stop and think before you decide you want to spawn 50 of those hello world apps .
2) If you have an MSDN account, then you have the promotional 750 hours of Azure credits per month and can use the Azure credits to explore the Cloud! But be aware, this promotion ends in 8 months (maybe more like 7 now) and then you will most likely go back to the standard 250 hours of Azure credits. If you do not delete your applications by then, you’ll get billed for the extra hours, believe me… There is a switch that you can toggle and which will STOP your automatic enrollment after the promotion and prevent you from renewing the Azure Account automatically. Yes the default setting is to automatically renew your account and remember, you entered your credit card information in the registration process so, yes, you WILL be billed… Go disable that ASAP Log into your account, go to “Windows Azure Platform” then click the “Subscriptions” tab and on the right side, you’ll see a drop down with different “Actions” into it… Choose “Opt out of auto renew” and, NOW you’re safe…
Still, this is a great offer by Microsoft and I think everyone that has a chance should play a bit with Azure to get to know this technology a bit more...
Happy Cloud Computing All
