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It just happened; the Name Server changes appear to have definitely propagated a couple of minutes ago. Why did I decide to abandon Windows Azure in favour of a traditional hosting for Would Be Better? There is one reason and one reason only: Money.

Hard facts

I’m not going to name any figures, but when looking through the Windows Azure invoices of the last couple of months I realised I could buy a year of traditional hosting including 2 SQL Server database for 2 months worth of Azure!

This was yesterday. That’s right; it took me all of 5 minutes to reach a conclusion, and the only thing that stopped me from migrating the site yesterday already is that the new hosting provider, DiscountASP.Net (the same one hosting this site) needed an hour or 2 to activate the new account.

Being fair

Is Windows Azure a bad platform? No, of course not. It is extremely cool if you ask me and I’m really happy I even took the time to deploy a live app on it. I just think it doesn’t make sense for Would Be Better yet.

And in all fairness, it could be I was doing lots of things wrong and driving the price up unnecessarily, but even reducing the number of databases (3: the main db, one for reporting and one for membership. yeah, yeah, I got carried away. Maybe. :þ), or choosing Extra Small Instances (yes, plural, your need at least to instances to comply with the SLA) would not make up for the hundreds of €’s I’ll save per year by moving to regular hosting.

Ever going back to Azure?

I most definitely hope I have to, but it will only happen when it makes sense. When is that? Well, I think Azure could be a terrific investment if you have, for instance, large hardware needs. It would probably be cheaper to pay for an Azure subscription than buying equivalent hardware (plus you spare yourself some system administration work if you go the Azure route, of course).

If Would Be Better generated huge amounts of traffic, or even better, money, I would have quite definitely stayed on Windows Azure; unfortunately, both things are quite a long way away.

What I’ll miss

Easy. Two things mainly:

1) The incredible Staging/Production environments: That’s right, with every Azure subscription you get the ability to deploy your app to a Staging environment, and when you decide it’s stable, promote it to production with no downtime.

2) Being able to say I’ve got an app hosted on Windows Azure

What I won’t miss

This one’s easy too: Having to wait 10 to 20 minutes (10 to 20!) for a deployment to complete, plus another 5 when you want to promote it to production. This one just drove me insane every time. Imagine what happens when you realize you have a typo in one of your views, or discover a small error in a JavaScript file. Despair, that’s what.

And being fair again, I’ve seen de deployment times go down over the last couple of months so it could just be that somebody is listening…