Azure Shared App Service

Question

Good morning, everyone ! I am developing an entertainment portal where you will have images and text (e.g., Earth or UOL), using ASP.NET and sql-server. I was looking into Azure and I came up with a question: Is the shared app service similar to the hosting service offered by others ( ex: Kinghost, Uolhost ) ? It is that in the Azure documentation, it recommends only for testing. But can I use it for production ? Is there a limit or disadvantage to the higher services ? Thanks in advance for the help !

Answer 1

In Azure, a shared-type billing plan, you can’t guarantee a minimum of resources (processing and memory) dedicated to your application. This is why it is not recommended to use this plan as the production plan, because time you will have the maximum available resource - which should be 0.25 core and 750mb memory - and time you will not have, experiencing great slowness.

The ideal, for production environment, is to dedicate resources to your application by signing up Basic series plans. According to your application publishing process requiring more control, you will already be able to work with the Standard series and control publications and experiment with features like slots, etc.

About more limitations, you can see on the page of Pricing of Application Services.

Answer 2

The shared application service is suitable for small websites with little traffic. For an entertainment portal, you will probably need a higher level, as Thiago said.

The Blue’s service is flexible and you can change the level at any time; it takes seconds. You can select the scale of a site in two methods: "Scale up" and "Scale out". The first, Scale up, sets the size of the machine.

(The prices in the image are in GBP and by a center in Europe. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but I don’t want to change my parameters. To give you an idea, 1 GBP = 5 BRL more or less.)

The second, Scale out, is the number of machines. You can use this with Basic, Standard, and Premium levels. Just like processing more load, it offers redundancy so it is more reliable.

The number of machines (instances) can be fixed or automatically variable, dependent on the load.

Of course, the cost may be considerable at the highest levels, but the Azure service is very convenient and has many advantages, including flexibility, huge power, and rentals around the world.

See "Resize a web application in the Azure Application Service" -- https://azure.microsoft.com/pt-br/documentation/articles/web-sites-scale/

If the application is international, you can put it in multiple data centres.

See "Azure Regions, Broad Global Reach" -- https://azure.microsoft.com/pt-br/regions/

If the site has many images, videos, etc, you could consider the Azure Content Delivery Network -- https://azure.microsoft.com/pt-br/services/cdn/

If your company is "start up", you can sign up for the Microsoft Bizspark program that offers free Azure features -- http://www.micbh.com.br/Paginas/Bizspark.aspx