9 ms·

Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme

146 points by sdaityari 13y ago

pbreit 13y ago
The best thing about BizSpark is free software. If you want low priced servers go to Digital Ocean.
sheetjs 13y ago
Previous discussion about bizspark and free azure access: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5293098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5293098
goldenkey 13y ago
You got a bill because you went over the free tier. I've had the same thing and talked to Amazon and they wiped the bill and credited me with $200 worth of credit for the inconvenience and misunderstanding. Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later. That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual Studio, other MS software, so when you are profitable, you pay them through the nose, because you are locked into proprietary anti-open-source bait. You weren't diligent, and didn't even reach out to Amazon. Instead you went with a shitty competitor and we're supposed to applaud that? What's the moral here? That you're unable to reach out to a company when you feel like you were taken advantage of? Sorry, Azure is still garbage and AWS is one of the most advanced and performant cloud platforms available. Amazon still has the best support of any company in the consumer products and web services industry.
- shivaas 13y ago
  Spot on assessment. Ironically, the blog post felt like a MSFT sponsored post...
  - jaegerpicker 13y ago
    What? The comment has blatant falsehoods in it. Microsoft made some serious mistakes in the past but Azure really is a different product than they have ever offered. I don't care if people like it or not but at least be honest about it.
- tphan 13y ago
  Why is Windows Azure a terrible service?
  - film42 13y ago
    I signed up for the Azure trial program a while back, and I found the interface quite nice. About a week later I received a call from the Azure sales team asking if I would like to provision another MS SQL server -- I guess they looked into my billings. Anyways, I told the sales rep no thank you, and how I normally use linux machines for my startup. I asked if there were any promos for someone in my position, and the sales rep quoted me prices on developer network subscriptions, or something like that. Conclusion: I don't think it's terrible, but their tactics aren't always clear. AND, I'm consistently getting a bill for $2/m and I have no idea why.
    - cmircea 13y ago
      Look into the usage breakdown.
      - rda_au 13y ago
        Seriously --- all the detail is right there. http://imgur.com/KXm8BHO http://imgur.com/KXm8BHO And if you click "Download usage details", you get a csv of daily per-service usage data.
        film42 13y ago
        I'm sorry I didn't specify. I know how to check my usage, but my "next bill estimate" is only 11 cents. My total ends up somewhere between $1-3.
        rda_au 13y ago
        Hmm - maybe download your csv data and see if it reveals anything? It could be some kind of rounding. There's also http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/understand-your-bill/ http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/understand-your-bi... which might hint at something.
- sdaityari 13y ago
  I did reach out to them, but they wiped only my current usage- I still had to pay the old bill in full. I contacted some people in Amazon who had helped others I know with free credits, but no one came forward to help me when I needed them the most. I had no choice.
- sdaityari 13y ago
  Another thing. BizSpark gives me a small instance- with two cores and 3.5 GB memory. And I can start another instance with half of that capability under the $150 per month I get. That is given to every small startup which enrolls in BizSpark. For 3 years! Can Amazon beat that?
  - jessedhillon 13y ago
    Yes, we all read the article. The question is not how does Microsoft's free giveaway compare to that of AWS' -- it's, how much will that cost you in three years, once you've committed yourself to using those resources. What are you going to do after that, sign up again with a different email address?
    - rescendent 13y ago
      They price match and offer between 33%-97% discount on dev and test as well as charging per minute rather than per hour: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/ http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/
    - 300bps 13y ago
      Azure is completely price-competitive with AWS. In fact, AWS and Azure seem to be in a pricing war, lowering their prices anytime the other one does. They're both far cheaper than Rackspace. ...and seriously - you're worried about pricing three years from now with a startup?
    - sdaityari 13y ago
      You see, 3 years is a long time to grow and a startup where the co founders are developers, I hope we can get enough revenue at least to pay the server bills!
- sandGorgon 13y ago
  Actually, I would say the best cloud support comes from Rackspace. You actually get a phone call welcoming you and walking through the product, they have Cloud Advisors who will talk you through optimizing performance and if you pay 100$/month extra, someone who will configure and maintain nginx/mysql/haproxy/rails/django/etc.
  - patio11 13y ago
    As long as we're on the subject: anyone here use their managed tier of hosting (VPS or dedicated)? I'm on their standard Cloud Servers (VPS) after having been force-migrated when they bought Slicehost. My experience with their support at that level has been... uneven. If managed means I get their best guys touching my nginx config files, I'd buy that today. If it gets me someone drawn from the pool at random, I'd run screaming.
    - sandGorgon 13y ago
      I'm very curious about this as well - although I would accept a standard "recipe" that is implemented by <random> and designed by <best>. Did you ever try reaching out ? I'm way too small for them to be answering org questions !
  - locusm 13y ago
    I wanted to try Rackspace but needed more than a single IP and couldn't wait for their approval process. This is where AWS shines...
    - marcusr 13y ago
      I tried Rackspace but there's no equivalent of AWS's elastic IP, so if you stop the instance you lose the IP address. It's ok if you go through load balancers, but no good for a single site with a single IP.
    - dagw 13y ago
      That's my experience with Rackspace. They're fairly inflexible in what they offer, and it's a bit of a pain to go outside of their standard offerings, but if you can work within their limits then they offer truly unparalleled service even for tiny 'insignificant' customers.
- rwg 13y ago
  Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later. BizSpark giving away three years of $150/mo Azure credit is shady, but Amazon giving away one year of the free tier is not shady? That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual Studio, other MS software, so when you are profitable, you pay them through the nose, because you are locked into proprietary anti-open-source bait. You don't have to use the software licenses to make use of the Azure credits in BizSpark, and Azure will run any Linux distro containing a kernel with Hyper-V support. Instead you went with a shitty competitor and we're supposed to applaud that? What's so shitty about Azure again? Sorry, Azure is still garbage Why? and AWS is one of the most advanced and performant cloud platforms available. Unfortunately, staying in AWS's free tier means never seeing any of that performance.
  - quink 13y ago
    Embrace, extend, extinguish. Justified or not, Microsoft's history makes it hard for me to trust them. AWS have wiped over $2000 in excess charges incurred by one of our instances' data transfer - we set up an alert after that - they've been awesome to us and we trust them and are now spending more and more every month.
    - orf 13y ago
      So they wiped some money you owed for data transfer that most likely cost them absolutely nothing. Big deal.
      - Rapidwire 13y ago
        How many other companies do you think would do that?
        orf 13y ago
        My company would. Bandwidth costs very little (and AWS must make a huge markup on it).
    - 13y ago
- threeseed 13y ago
  You get great Linux support from Amazon ? I love AWS to bits but their support is basically non-existent.
- anonymoushn 13y ago
  Amazon billed me ~$40 for debugging their service (problem: micro instances become completely unreachable after a few minutes, suggested course of action: spin up a few instances, tell us which ones they are, and we'll have a look). This does not seem like good support.
  - TheRealWatson 13y ago
    Two last paid support cases were closed after they identified a bug in their code and we found a more elegant fix than the hack suggested by them. We still had to pay for both. I'm not impressed with aws support so far. Especially Elastic Beanstalk. Looking into OpsWork to take matters in my own hands.
- nl 13y ago
  I'm an Apache committer, and because of that Microsoft gives me a free MSDN subscription (which includes Azure credits). I use Azure to run assorted Ubuntu machines. They run well, the interface is nice and I have no complaints. I also have a few EC2 VMs (and some DigitalCloud VMs and some Rackspace VMs and in the past have had HP Cloud VMs and Linode VMs). Amazon is good, too. But I signed up for EC2 before the free micro-tier came in, so I got nothing from them. So what I want to know is why I should feel scared, running Ubuntu on Azure? And what is wrong with giving Microsoft credit for offering good programs like Bizspark? (And read that first sentence again, BTW. That's a real thing, and no other company does that)
  - scotu 13y ago
    absolutely nothing, if there is no lock-in (using asp.net for example). and you can get locked in as if you use some of their services. you can also evaluate where lock in is acceptable for you/your project... the important thing is knowing it I guess :)
    - UK-AL 13y ago
      You can get lock in if you use some of Amazons service.
- graving 13y ago
  > proprietary anti-open-source bait. Can you tell me which of the ~1000 VM images they provide as listed in the below site are proprietary? All? None? Some? http://vmdepot.msopentech.com/List/Index http://vmdepot.msopentech.com/List/Index Also, Azure charges you less for Linux VMs compared Windows VMs with the same hardware specs. A medium instance costs 12cents/hour with Linux and 18c/hr with Windows Server. That's 50% higher! If anything, it looks like they're trying to lock you into Linux. I don't have any beef with Amazon, but it looks like you haven't really looked at Azure before making such sweeping assertions with zero details, except some handwaving which makes it sad that this is the top comment on this story.
  - _random_ 13y ago
    It's funny to see times when someone who is refusing to use Microsoft products is actually closed-minded!
- Ecio78 13y ago
  Sure because you don't have any lock-in by using Amazon RBS, SQS, SBF, SNS and 90% of the remaining Amazon Web Services Products And you don't have to pay for them at the end of the free tier period, sure not.
- nailer 13y ago
  I hack node, on a Mac, using Sublime. I use both AWS and Azure, and they're both fantastic and terrible: - Azure has better, more polished web management, AWS is more flexible - Azure gives 500s, 404s and 403s occasionally, AWS has outage IDs that don't appear in their status page and has useless support even when you pay for it. Either way, I don't feel locked into Windows or Visual Studio when using Azure, which is good, as I don't use any of those products. The most 'Windows' I get is nodes process module returning some more Windowsy values when I use Azure Web Sites. Otherwise I don't care. Oh yeah and Azure Web Sites doesn't support gulp (or even grunt) yet so I commit generated assets. PS: is this really the #1 comment on Hacker News? - If you've used Azure, you know it doesn't require MS languages or tools - If you haven't used Azure, why are you upvoting this guy's conspiracy theory?
  - ManFromUranus 13y ago
    I think HN, much like Slashdot, loves to hate on MS.
- harel 13y ago
  I had a similar incident where my free tier went over some restriction and charged me. Amazon wiped it out after one single email from me. And I got some free credits. Amazon's support is second to none, in any area. I have no experience with azure to make a comment but anything that uses microsoft tech is just not going to work for me, free or paid.
  - jaegerpicker 13y ago
    It's not Microsoft tech though. I run two python/django apps and a node.js app, back by a mongodb and two riak db's. They are running on CentOS5 and Ubuntu 13.04. How is any of that MS tech?
- ApacheEcho 13y ago
  People discrediting what they don't understand. The anti-microsoft sentiment is getting old. Grow up.
- soDotNet 13y ago
  "That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual Studio, other MS software, so when you are profitable, you pay them through the nose, because you are locked into proprietary anti-open-source bait." Really? The author didn't use any of MS technology. What are you raging about? "You weren't diligent, and didn't even reach out to Amazon. Instead you went with a shitty competitor and we're supposed to applaud that? What's the moral here?" Like begging Amazon to wipe their bill because they are start up? MS gave them 3 years of hosting from the get go without begging. Again, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU RAGING ABOUT? This here is why Hacker News is going down the toilet. Raging against something simply because hey it's Microsoft.
- it_learnses 13y ago
  I smell an amazon fan boy hatin on other services. Did you even read his article? You don't have to use microsoft products on Azure. Get that weak shit outta here, son.
- mcgwiz 13y ago
  "Bait"? Oh geez. First, they have Linux images all available under BizSpark. Second, you act as if entrepreneurs are idiots who don't read terms/considerations of agreements and aren't capable of evaluating costs/benefits. Everything about the BizSpark program is transparent. If you fail to understand the terms and to consider the ramifications (and if necessary hedge against risks by making your technology portable to other clouds), that is your fault. No one is forced into the program.
shearnie 13y ago
I made the switch from AWS to Azure prior to being signed up with BizSpark. And from my experience is a a whole lot more bang for your buck for what you get even it you're just spinning up a bog standard VM. And might I add the AWS micro instance is pretty useless for anything besides having a tiny play. You'll never even have a test site working properly on t1.micro. The other thing that swung me is the managed scaling for database and IIS in Azure where you just tweak a slider to allocate CPU's as required. Note this works for anything that can run on IIS such as PHP or Node or whatever not just for ASP.NET. Now with Bizspark (and albeit fairly insignificant traffic for my startup) it's lots of bang for no bucks. At least for three years until we get any decent traction and will get vendor lock in with MS and get stung by massive SQL licensing costs. I know there's a lot of bad image for M$, but I honestly and optimistically believe that "Microsoft <3 Startups".
- curiouscat321 13y ago
  Why would you need to pay SQL licensing costs? Couldn't you use their SQL storage platform (or Amazon's, or anybody else's)?
  - 300bps 13y ago
    I've used it both ways. Using SQL licensing is much easier for someone already used to that. You can't do much with standard SQL tools (ex: Management Studio) while using an Azure SQL Database. You have to use the web interface. Backing up is different, restoring is different, designing tables is different. Copying databases from a local SQL instance to a SQL Azure is not straight-forward like copying a .bak file and restoring it and there are features in standard SQL that aren't supported in SQL Azure.
3pt14159 13y ago
Eh. Cloud66 + Digital Ocean is cheap enough. I'd rather go with someone that doesn't need marketing tricks to get me onto their servers.
- mr337 13y ago
  I agree, this thing reads like a gigantic marketing add.
- ksk 13y ago
  "I'd rather go with someone whose users didn't have to resort to negative marketing tricks to get me onto their servers." Anyone can use any "logic" to defend their decisions. I'm sure you have other good reasons to use whatever products you're using but you've failed to mention any of those.
- sergiotapia 13y ago
  Sorry for the bother, hopefully you can help me clear something up. Is Cloud66 a tool that I can use to set up a blank VPS? I _can_ configure my own VPS (DigitalOcean) but it's a pain in the ass and it's always different for every box. I've looked into Chef and it seems half-assed where recipes work on Ubuntu 12.04 x64 but not on Ubuntu 12.10 x86, you see? Fixes some problems, but just gives me other problems. I want something where I can check some boxes and say give me a PostgreSQL database with this master username-password. Configuring nginx for me with this folder as the root website container and install ruby 2.0.0 and rails. My needs are basic, but it's odd that nothing out there exists like this. PHP has XAMPP which install everything you need.
  - grey-area 13y ago
    Look into Ansible, docker, etc. there are many options which do what you describe above
rdl 13y ago
I love BizSpark because it makes setting up new Windows VMs for testing (browsers, code deployment, etc.) pretty painless - you get at least 2 valid serial numbers for virtually every Microsoft product ever through the MSDN subscription, and you get to keep them after the MSDN expires. I'm also looking at doing some stuff with Windows Phone hardware (not with the OS, just the hardware...), so there's value in that. I haven't even touched Azure yet.
- sandGorgon 13y ago
  and you get to keep them after the MSDN expires Are you sure about this ? Any more details (assigned to company/individual, etc. ) ?
  - rdl 13y ago
    It's explicitly in the terms -- you get to keep the licenses for the software you've downloaded. Presumably they stay with the company which had the bizspark account.
    - Ecio78 13y ago
      http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/faqs.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/faqs.aspx has a lot of information about it
- herokusaki 13y ago
  > I'm also looking at doing some stuff with Windows Phone hardware (not with the OS, just the hardware...), so there's value in that. Can you elaborate on that? AFAIK nothing but Windows Phone runs on WP8 hardware.
tantalor 13y ago
@sdaityari Please fix: datelines and bylines go at the top of the article, not the bottom.
- ifix 13y ago
  Mr. Sdaityari is free to do as he pleases, I do believe.
- sdaityari 13y ago
  First thing in my Todo list.
mani04 13y ago
How about Google App Engine for startups? They give a free tier, which I presume is free for life as long as the web application stays within quota. Ofcourse there is lock-in, there is no free lunch anywhere! But it should be ok for startups with no capital, who just want to figure out their business model. Once the idea is validated, they can always learn from the experience, and rewrite the application if platform absolutely needs to be changed. Disclaimer: I don't get paid by Google for writing this, though I am trying to do something with google app engine (python) and that may lead to some bias on my side :-)
- tphan 13y ago
  I don't think it's the same. BizSpark is the equivalent of Google given you free access to their entire Cloud Platform, e.g. Compute Engine, App Engine, Cloud SQL, free upgrades of OS X and free copies of of IntelliJ IDEA... for three years.
  - mani04 13y ago
    Agreed. It is not a fair comparison, BizSpark probably provides a lot more. But for a startup with only developers and zero capital, App Engine still provides a great platform to get started. And also, there is no need to apply and get accepted, everyone gets the free quota. Let me change my initial comment - for those who didn't get into BizSpark and who have run out of their free AWS quota can consider Google App Engine for their experiments :-)
- sdaityari 13y ago
  One thing that Azure and EC2 gives that Google App Engine does not is root access to VMs. Modifying my models with respect to the App Engine doesn't really seem like a good idea. Maybe I am too lazy to do that, but I just don't want to leave something that gives me a whole new machine on the cloud!
  - Lewisham 13y ago
    While you can't get root on App Engine, you can get root on a Google Compute Engine instance, and you can use Cloud SQL for a standard data backend. You don't have to use a keystore deal like the old days anymore (pre-2011). Disclaimer: I'm a dev on Cloud SQL.
jtchang 13y ago
A bunch of you guys complaining about how BizSpark sucks...have any of you actually USED BizSpark and their free Azure offering? I've used it for a Windows server just to get stuff up and running that may not run on Linux. I've downloaded and used some of the free MS software. Give Microsoft some credit.
- tarblog 13y ago
  You don't give credit. You earn it.
  - bybjorn 13y ago
    You give somone credit if they have earned it.
  - mcgwiz 13y ago
    True, but I think he meant give them a chance. His point is that people seem to be criticizing it without direct experience, especially in a case that seems clearly fair on Azure's part to people who have experience with both Azure and AWS. Generally speaking, how can something earn credit when people are prejudiced against it and won't give it a chance?
ypmagic 13y ago
Great article.
- sdaityari 13y ago
  Thanks :)
captn3m0 13y ago
I signed up for BizSpark after reading this blog post a while back (I know the author), and I can say, its not as bad as you people are making it sound. Sure, it tries to force MS crap in your face; but if you are diligent enough you can avoid it all. For instance, I'm just using a medium Ubuntu VM, which I can deploy/clone at will in case Azure goes down.
ddmma 13y ago
Is the idea of your startup or the technology you use to build your idea? BizSpark is a program like no other. http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/connectworld.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/connectworld.aspx Leave preconceptions in the past and start building your idea!
- unmole 13y ago
  Who cares about long term vendor independence? Just get your 'free' hosting and tools from Microsoft NOW! You can always sell off your kidneys to pay for the cost of the service or the cost of switching three years down the line.
  - hackerboos 13y ago
    I see this point a lot but who cares about vendor lock-in if it speeds up your 'time to market'. Bizspark is especially beneficial if you were going to use the MS stack anyway or you have experience of it.
  - jaegerpicker 13y ago
    Expect Azure is cheaper than AWS and has less lock in. So, what's the point you are trying to make? I'm not a microsoft developer, I'm a python/django and iOS dev, but Azure and BizSpark are pretty great platforms/programs. I don't care if people use them or like them but I'd really prefer if people would at least give some kind of valid reason when they are bashing it.
monkeyspaw 13y ago
Side point - it's likely you had many more "visitors" than the <10 / day indicated in the article. On most sites I run, I see about 10% of my traffic as showing up in Google Analytics. I hypothesize this is because most of the traffic on the internet is bots. Bing Bot is the worst at this. They hammer my sites, send me zero traffic, and don't appear to allow me to control their behavior very well. I get 50x the traffic from google cmp to bing, but google is about 1/3 the hits (when looking @ raw logs).
- herokusaki 13y ago
  That sounds awful. Can you block it through robots.txt? If not, and if Bing gives you no traffic, you could feed it blank (or just super truncated) pages based on the user agent.
noir_lord 13y ago
Tried to sign up for BizSpark about 18 months ago, small start-up business looking at developing a SaaS system. As a primarily linux web dev I still thought it worth seeing what the MS technologies might offer, they told me to bog off. So my entire company is and will be built around Debian/Apache/Postgres/PHP and Python for now and the foreseeable. (In actual fact it left such a bad taste in my mouth that all non development machines (when I have some lol) will be non-MS entirely aswell).
- 300bps 13y ago
  As a primarily linux web dev I still thought it worth seeing what the MS technologies might offer, they told me to bog off. I keep seeing people post things like this and I cannot imagine how dumb someone has to be to get turned down for BizSpark. They are so amazingly clear in the rules of what you need: 1. A custom domain email address 2. Some semblance of a web site I registered a domain name for $4, made a free Outlook.com email address on it and put up a "Coming Soon!" website. I then spent 5 minutes filling out the application. 4 days later I was approved with no follow up questions. Now I get free Microsoft software for life (you keep your MSDN subscription licenses forever), free Azure hosting for three years and a ton of other benefits. For a $4 domain that I'll be using as a startup and about 10 minutes of my time.
warrenmiller 13y ago
You might not like it after 3 years when you're deeply tied into their software/services and you realise how expensive it can be...
- rescendent 13y ago
  Its not that expensive; you get a discount for a further 2 years and if after 5 years you aren't making enough money to afford your licences you might just want to start a new company and re-enroll. And that's not being able to afford your licences that you are using beyond the program: "BizSpark Alumni can keep, at no charge, all the software they downloaded during their three years in the program, including a standard configuration of Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server." It would suggest you are doing something wrong if you can't afford what ever extra licences, you need to use passed this and 5 years on...
- gamblor956 13y ago
  If you can't afford their software or services after 3 years than the problem is that your startup never became a real business. The BizSpark program is intended for people trying to launch new businesses (hence the name). It's not intended for hobby projects or side projects.
bunkerbewohner 13y ago
My startup enrolled for BizSpark 6 months ago and we're super happy so far. Setting up VMs is dead easy and we're running two server instances (small and medium) and geographically redundant cloud storage. Didn't have any problems so far, it just seems to work.
happywolf 13y ago
It always amuses me to see 1) people complain of the need to pay for a service 2) [more amusing point] the free stuff is not good enough. Beggars can't be choosers, if one wants something, earn enough and pay for it. My solutions? There are two: 1) Work long enough to have reasonable amount of savings to fund my start-up, free stuff is nice, but they are sometimes risky. Reason being, how much leverage do you have when you didn't pay for something? 2) Be creative, there are always solutions out there. Writing an article to complain about a free service being not good enough really make me wondering if these 'entrepreneurs' are ready for the real world. My start-up runs on a 512MB shared instance on $9/mth, and so far it meets my need. BizSpark may have good perks, but it is beside the point.
cmircea 13y ago
It's even better - you get an MSDN subscription for up to 10 people, each with $150 Azure credits ($200 first month) and you can use all of them in production. That's $1500.
- sdaityari 13y ago
  Yes, that's something I haven't tried and it's a luxury that this startup doesn't really need now.
unmole 13y ago
If you're running on an open source stack, Redhat's OpenStack PaaS seems like a good place to start. You get 3 'gears' free for life and its Docker ready.
Maarten88 13y ago
It's great that you can run Ubuntu VM's running Python/Django apps on Azure, as the author has done. However, I think you can get more out of Azure by using its PaaS services. It is also possible to run a Python/django app in an Azure Website Service. The cost is the same, but management and security if the OS is taken care of for you. Upgrades and patches happen automatically. You can setup automated build, test and deployment from Git. You can setup background and maintenance jobs without having to manage cron. You can setup auto scaling of VM's. It saves a lot of work. Of course, this risk of this is lock-in. But the technologies underlying Azure are almost all open. If you're carefull what you use, you can always take your code and run it on a VM in AWS if you want. Of course, you would have to setup/build your own scaling and maintenance processes, using (also proprietary) AWS services. Like Microsoft, Amazon is likewise trying to get you to use proprietary cloud services. If you use S3, Beanstalk, Redshift, Search, you get locked in to AWS the same way Microsoft will lock you when you use SQL Azure, Azure Table Storage or Service Bus. You just need to be be very careful with any dependencies you take on into your startup. That said, I have also had a very good experience with BizSpark. Not only do they give you lot of free stuff, but I they can also connect you with interesting partners internationally, and help your business in unexpected ways.
- rescendent 13y ago
  Except Microsoft's "lock in" is lighter; if you build using AWS or Google tech; you are using proprietary tech that can only be hosted by them, which is a deep lock in. If you build on Azure tech; you aren't locked into MS being the host of the services; you can run an Azure cloud entirely in your own datacenter; you can use Azure as overflow in a Hybrid model http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/solutions/hybrid-cloud.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/solutions/hybrid... or if you have legal or compliance needs to not host with a US company you can use one of their many partners: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/dec13/12-12cosnpr.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/dec13/12-12co... as the "Cloud OS" provider. They even providing server and datacenter blueprints as part of the Open Compute Project http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/01/27/microsoft-contributes-cloud-server-designs-to-the-open-compute-project.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/01/27... with datacenter rack management software, if you want to build your own datacenter. All their client libraries are even on GitHub https://github.com/WindowsAzure https://github.com/WindowsAzure
darklegend 13y ago
We had a conversation with our BizSpark manager and you can also apply for BizSpark plus. This needs an additional review of your Startup, but if you succeed you get 10.000$ (or 15.000$ - not sure anymore) in Azure credits every month. Quite nice to get some traction at the beginning :-)
- _delirium 13y ago
  According to this page it's $5.000/mo for the first 12 months: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/plus/default.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/plus/default.aspx Also the front page says only startups who are members of designated startup-accelerator programs can apply, though it's entirely possible that could be waived by your BizSpark manager.
- sandGorgon 13y ago
  @darklegend - my startup is already part of the BizSpark program, but it seems that the "Plus" program means that you have to go through an accelerator first. Is this requirement still valid - would have loved to apply directly (our core target market includes Windows Desktop software as well)
Patrick_Devine 13y ago
I have no idea how well Azure stacks up to AWS, however, when I read Shaumik's post I couldn't help but think it was some kind of guerrilla marketing tactic conceived by a faceless shill in the inner bowels of Microsoft's marketing department. The What are you waiting for? Sign up for BizSpark already! comment really set my bullshit detector off. Shaumik, did you really take the time to go figure out the URL to their signup page to put in your blog post? Are they paying you for this stuff?

146 points by sdaityari 13y ago

The best thing about BizSpark is free software. If you want low priced servers go to Digital Ocean.

Previous discussion about bizspark and free azure access: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5293098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5293098

goldenkey 13y ago

You got a bill because you went over the free tier. I've had the same thing and talked to Amazon and they wiped the bill and credited me with $200 worth of credit for the inconvenience and misunderstanding. Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later. That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual Studio, other MS software, so when you are profitable, you pay them through the nose, because you are locked into proprietary anti-open-source bait. You weren't diligent, and didn't even reach out to Amazon. Instead you went with a shitty competitor and we're supposed to applaud that? What's the moral here? That you're unable to reach out to a company when you feel like you were taken advantage of? Sorry, Azure is still garbage and AWS is one of the most advanced and performant cloud platforms available. Amazon still has the best support of any company in the consumer products and web services industry.

shivaas 13y ago
Spot on assessment. Ironically, the blog post felt like a MSFT sponsored post...
- jaegerpicker 13y ago
  What? The comment has blatant falsehoods in it. Microsoft made some serious mistakes in the past but Azure really is a different product than they have ever offered. I don't care if people like it or not but at least be honest about it.
tphan 13y ago
Why is Windows Azure a terrible service?
- film42 13y ago
  I signed up for the Azure trial program a while back, and I found the interface quite nice. About a week later I received a call from the Azure sales team asking if I would like to provision another MS SQL server -- I guess they looked into my billings. Anyways, I told the sales rep no thank you, and how I normally use linux machines for my startup. I asked if there were any promos for someone in my position, and the sales rep quoted me prices on developer network subscriptions, or something like that. Conclusion: I don't think it's terrible, but their tactics aren't always clear. AND, I'm consistently getting a bill for $2/m and I have no idea why.
  - cmircea 13y ago
    Look into the usage breakdown.
    - rda_au 13y ago
      Seriously --- all the detail is right there. http://imgur.com/KXm8BHO http://imgur.com/KXm8BHO And if you click "Download usage details", you get a csv of daily per-service usage data.
      - film42 13y ago
        I'm sorry I didn't specify. I know how to check my usage, but my "next bill estimate" is only 11 cents. My total ends up somewhere between $1-3.
        rda_au 13y ago
        Hmm - maybe download your csv data and see if it reveals anything? It could be some kind of rounding. There's also http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/understand-your-bill/ http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/understand-your-bi... which might hint at something.
sdaityari 13y ago
I did reach out to them, but they wiped only my current usage- I still had to pay the old bill in full. I contacted some people in Amazon who had helped others I know with free credits, but no one came forward to help me when I needed them the most. I had no choice.
sdaityari 13y ago
Another thing. BizSpark gives me a small instance- with two cores and 3.5 GB memory. And I can start another instance with half of that capability under the $150 per month I get. That is given to every small startup which enrolls in BizSpark. For 3 years! Can Amazon beat that?
- jessedhillon 13y ago
  Yes, we all read the article. The question is not how does Microsoft's free giveaway compare to that of AWS' -- it's, how much will that cost you in three years, once you've committed yourself to using those resources. What are you going to do after that, sign up again with a different email address?
  - rescendent 13y ago
    They price match and offer between 33%-97% discount on dev and test as well as charging per minute rather than per hour: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/ http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/
  - 300bps 13y ago
    Azure is completely price-competitive with AWS. In fact, AWS and Azure seem to be in a pricing war, lowering their prices anytime the other one does. They're both far cheaper than Rackspace. ...and seriously - you're worried about pricing three years from now with a startup?
  - sdaityari 13y ago
    You see, 3 years is a long time to grow and a startup where the co founders are developers, I hope we can get enough revenue at least to pay the server bills!
sandGorgon 13y ago
Actually, I would say the best cloud support comes from Rackspace. You actually get a phone call welcoming you and walking through the product, they have Cloud Advisors who will talk you through optimizing performance and if you pay 100$/month extra, someone who will configure and maintain nginx/mysql/haproxy/rails/django/etc.
- patio11 13y ago
  As long as we're on the subject: anyone here use their managed tier of hosting (VPS or dedicated)? I'm on their standard Cloud Servers (VPS) after having been force-migrated when they bought Slicehost. My experience with their support at that level has been... uneven. If managed means I get their best guys touching my nginx config files, I'd buy that today. If it gets me someone drawn from the pool at random, I'd run screaming.
  - sandGorgon 13y ago
    I'm very curious about this as well - although I would accept a standard "recipe" that is implemented by <random> and designed by <best>. Did you ever try reaching out ? I'm way too small for them to be answering org questions !
- locusm 13y ago
  I wanted to try Rackspace but needed more than a single IP and couldn't wait for their approval process. This is where AWS shines...
  - marcusr 13y ago
    I tried Rackspace but there's no equivalent of AWS's elastic IP, so if you stop the instance you lose the IP address. It's ok if you go through load balancers, but no good for a single site with a single IP.
  - dagw 13y ago
    That's my experience with Rackspace. They're fairly inflexible in what they offer, and it's a bit of a pain to go outside of their standard offerings, but if you can work within their limits then they offer truly unparalleled service even for tiny 'insignificant' customers.
rwg 13y ago
Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later. BizSpark giving away three years of $150/mo Azure credit is shady, but Amazon giving away one year of the free tier is not shady? That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual Studio, other MS software, so when you are profitable, you pay them through the nose, because you are locked into proprietary anti-open-source bait. You don't have to use the software licenses to make use of the Azure credits in BizSpark, and Azure will run any Linux distro containing a kernel with Hyper-V support. Instead you went with a shitty competitor and we're supposed to applaud that? What's so shitty about Azure again? Sorry, Azure is still garbage Why? and AWS is one of the most advanced and performant cloud platforms available. Unfortunately, staying in AWS's free tier means never seeing any of that performance.
- quink 13y ago
  Embrace, extend, extinguish. Justified or not, Microsoft's history makes it hard for me to trust them. AWS have wiped over $2000 in excess charges incurred by one of our instances' data transfer - we set up an alert after that - they've been awesome to us and we trust them and are now spending more and more every month.
  - orf 13y ago
    So they wiped some money you owed for data transfer that most likely cost them absolutely nothing. Big deal.
    - Rapidwire 13y ago
      How many other companies do you think would do that?
      - orf 13y ago
        My company would. Bandwidth costs very little (and AWS must make a huge markup on it).
  - 13y ago
threeseed 13y ago
You get great Linux support from Amazon ? I love AWS to bits but their support is basically non-existent.
anonymoushn 13y ago
Amazon billed me ~$40 for debugging their service (problem: micro instances become completely unreachable after a few minutes, suggested course of action: spin up a few instances, tell us which ones they are, and we'll have a look). This does not seem like good support.
- TheRealWatson 13y ago
  Two last paid support cases were closed after they identified a bug in their code and we found a more elegant fix than the hack suggested by them. We still had to pay for both. I'm not impressed with aws support so far. Especially Elastic Beanstalk. Looking into OpsWork to take matters in my own hands.
nl 13y ago
I'm an Apache committer, and because of that Microsoft gives me a free MSDN subscription (which includes Azure credits). I use Azure to run assorted Ubuntu machines. They run well, the interface is nice and I have no complaints. I also have a few EC2 VMs (and some DigitalCloud VMs and some Rackspace VMs and in the past have had HP Cloud VMs and Linode VMs). Amazon is good, too. But I signed up for EC2 before the free micro-tier came in, so I got nothing from them. So what I want to know is why I should feel scared, running Ubuntu on Azure? And what is wrong with giving Microsoft credit for offering good programs like Bizspark? (And read that first sentence again, BTW. That's a real thing, and no other company does that)
- scotu 13y ago
  absolutely nothing, if there is no lock-in (using asp.net for example). and you can get locked in as if you use some of their services. you can also evaluate where lock in is acceptable for you/your project... the important thing is knowing it I guess :)
  - UK-AL 13y ago
    You can get lock in if you use some of Amazons service.
graving 13y ago
> proprietary anti-open-source bait. Can you tell me which of the ~1000 VM images they provide as listed in the below site are proprietary? All? None? Some? http://vmdepot.msopentech.com/List/Index http://vmdepot.msopentech.com/List/Index Also, Azure charges you less for Linux VMs compared Windows VMs with the same hardware specs. A medium instance costs 12cents/hour with Linux and 18c/hr with Windows Server. That's 50% higher! If anything, it looks like they're trying to lock you into Linux. I don't have any beef with Amazon, but it looks like you haven't really looked at Azure before making such sweeping assertions with zero details, except some handwaving which makes it sad that this is the top comment on this story.
- _random_ 13y ago
  It's funny to see times when someone who is refusing to use Microsoft products is actually closed-minded!
Ecio78 13y ago
Sure because you don't have any lock-in by using Amazon RBS, SQS, SBF, SNS and 90% of the remaining Amazon Web Services Products And you don't have to pay for them at the end of the free tier period, sure not.
nailer 13y ago
I hack node, on a Mac, using Sublime. I use both AWS and Azure, and they're both fantastic and terrible: - Azure has better, more polished web management, AWS is more flexible - Azure gives 500s, 404s and 403s occasionally, AWS has outage IDs that don't appear in their status page and has useless support even when you pay for it. Either way, I don't feel locked into Windows or Visual Studio when using Azure, which is good, as I don't use any of those products. The most 'Windows' I get is nodes process module returning some more Windowsy values when I use Azure Web Sites. Otherwise I don't care. Oh yeah and Azure Web Sites doesn't support gulp (or even grunt) yet so I commit generated assets. PS: is this really the #1 comment on Hacker News? - If you've used Azure, you know it doesn't require MS languages or tools - If you haven't used Azure, why are you upvoting this guy's conspiracy theory?
- ManFromUranus 13y ago
  I think HN, much like Slashdot, loves to hate on MS.
harel 13y ago
I had a similar incident where my free tier went over some restriction and charged me. Amazon wiped it out after one single email from me. And I got some free credits. Amazon's support is second to none, in any area. I have no experience with azure to make a comment but anything that uses microsoft tech is just not going to work for me, free or paid.
- jaegerpicker 13y ago
  It's not Microsoft tech though. I run two python/django apps and a node.js app, back by a mongodb and two riak db's. They are running on CentOS5 and Ubuntu 13.04. How is any of that MS tech?
ApacheEcho 13y ago
People discrediting what they don't understand. The anti-microsoft sentiment is getting old. Grow up.
soDotNet 13y ago
"That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual Studio, other MS software, so when you are profitable, you pay them through the nose, because you are locked into proprietary anti-open-source bait." Really? The author didn't use any of MS technology. What are you raging about? "You weren't diligent, and didn't even reach out to Amazon. Instead you went with a shitty competitor and we're supposed to applaud that? What's the moral here?" Like begging Amazon to wipe their bill because they are start up? MS gave them 3 years of hosting from the get go without begging. Again, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU RAGING ABOUT? This here is why Hacker News is going down the toilet. Raging against something simply because hey it's Microsoft.
it_learnses 13y ago
I smell an amazon fan boy hatin on other services. Did you even read his article? You don't have to use microsoft products on Azure. Get that weak shit outta here, son.
mcgwiz 13y ago
"Bait"? Oh geez. First, they have Linux images all available under BizSpark. Second, you act as if entrepreneurs are idiots who don't read terms/considerations of agreements and aren't capable of evaluating costs/benefits. Everything about the BizSpark program is transparent. If you fail to understand the terms and to consider the ramifications (and if necessary hedge against risks by making your technology portable to other clouds), that is your fault. No one is forced into the program.

shearnie 13y ago

I made the switch from AWS to Azure prior to being signed up with BizSpark. And from my experience is a a whole lot more bang for your buck for what you get even it you're just spinning up a bog standard VM. And might I add the AWS micro instance is pretty useless for anything besides having a tiny play. You'll never even have a test site working properly on t1.micro. The other thing that swung me is the managed scaling for database and IIS in Azure where you just tweak a slider to allocate CPU's as required. Note this works for anything that can run on IIS such as PHP or Node or whatever not just for ASP.NET. Now with Bizspark (and albeit fairly insignificant traffic for my startup) it's lots of bang for no bucks. At least for three years until we get any decent traction and will get vendor lock in with MS and get stung by massive SQL licensing costs. I know there's a lot of bad image for M$, but I honestly and optimistically believe that "Microsoft <3 Startups".

curiouscat321 13y ago
Why would you need to pay SQL licensing costs? Couldn't you use their SQL storage platform (or Amazon's, or anybody else's)?
- 300bps 13y ago
  I've used it both ways. Using SQL licensing is much easier for someone already used to that. You can't do much with standard SQL tools (ex: Management Studio) while using an Azure SQL Database. You have to use the web interface. Backing up is different, restoring is different, designing tables is different. Copying databases from a local SQL instance to a SQL Azure is not straight-forward like copying a .bak file and restoring it and there are features in standard SQL that aren't supported in SQL Azure.

3pt14159 13y ago

Eh. Cloud66 + Digital Ocean is cheap enough. I'd rather go with someone that doesn't need marketing tricks to get me onto their servers.

mr337 13y ago
I agree, this thing reads like a gigantic marketing add.
ksk 13y ago
"I'd rather go with someone whose users didn't have to resort to negative marketing tricks to get me onto their servers." Anyone can use any "logic" to defend their decisions. I'm sure you have other good reasons to use whatever products you're using but you've failed to mention any of those.
sergiotapia 13y ago
Sorry for the bother, hopefully you can help me clear something up. Is Cloud66 a tool that I can use to set up a blank VPS? I _can_ configure my own VPS (DigitalOcean) but it's a pain in the ass and it's always different for every box. I've looked into Chef and it seems half-assed where recipes work on Ubuntu 12.04 x64 but not on Ubuntu 12.10 x86, you see? Fixes some problems, but just gives me other problems. I want something where I can check some boxes and say give me a PostgreSQL database with this master username-password. Configuring nginx for me with this folder as the root website container and install ruby 2.0.0 and rails. My needs are basic, but it's odd that nothing out there exists like this. PHP has XAMPP which install everything you need.
- grey-area 13y ago
  Look into Ansible, docker, etc. there are many options which do what you describe above

rdl 13y ago

I love BizSpark because it makes setting up new Windows VMs for testing (browsers, code deployment, etc.) pretty painless - you get at least 2 valid serial numbers for virtually every Microsoft product ever through the MSDN subscription, and you get to keep them after the MSDN expires. I'm also looking at doing some stuff with Windows Phone hardware (not with the OS, just the hardware...), so there's value in that. I haven't even touched Azure yet.

sandGorgon 13y ago
and you get to keep them after the MSDN expires Are you sure about this ? Any more details (assigned to company/individual, etc. ) ?
- rdl 13y ago
  It's explicitly in the terms -- you get to keep the licenses for the software you've downloaded. Presumably they stay with the company which had the bizspark account.
  - Ecio78 13y ago
    http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/faqs.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/faqs.aspx has a lot of information about it
herokusaki 13y ago
> I'm also looking at doing some stuff with Windows Phone hardware (not with the OS, just the hardware...), so there's value in that. Can you elaborate on that? AFAIK nothing but Windows Phone runs on WP8 hardware.

tantalor 13y ago

@sdaityari Please fix: datelines and bylines go at the top of the article, not the bottom.

ifix 13y ago
Mr. Sdaityari is free to do as he pleases, I do believe.
sdaityari 13y ago
First thing in my Todo list.

mani04 13y ago

How about Google App Engine for startups? They give a free tier, which I presume is free for life as long as the web application stays within quota. Ofcourse there is lock-in, there is no free lunch anywhere! But it should be ok for startups with no capital, who just want to figure out their business model. Once the idea is validated, they can always learn from the experience, and rewrite the application if platform absolutely needs to be changed. Disclaimer: I don't get paid by Google for writing this, though I am trying to do something with google app engine (python) and that may lead to some bias on my side :-)

tphan 13y ago
I don't think it's the same. BizSpark is the equivalent of Google given you free access to their entire Cloud Platform, e.g. Compute Engine, App Engine, Cloud SQL, free upgrades of OS X and free copies of of IntelliJ IDEA... for three years.
- mani04 13y ago
  Agreed. It is not a fair comparison, BizSpark probably provides a lot more. But for a startup with only developers and zero capital, App Engine still provides a great platform to get started. And also, there is no need to apply and get accepted, everyone gets the free quota. Let me change my initial comment - for those who didn't get into BizSpark and who have run out of their free AWS quota can consider Google App Engine for their experiments :-)
sdaityari 13y ago
One thing that Azure and EC2 gives that Google App Engine does not is root access to VMs. Modifying my models with respect to the App Engine doesn't really seem like a good idea. Maybe I am too lazy to do that, but I just don't want to leave something that gives me a whole new machine on the cloud!
- Lewisham 13y ago
  While you can't get root on App Engine, you can get root on a Google Compute Engine instance, and you can use Cloud SQL for a standard data backend. You don't have to use a keystore deal like the old days anymore (pre-2011). Disclaimer: I'm a dev on Cloud SQL.

jtchang 13y ago

A bunch of you guys complaining about how BizSpark sucks...have any of you actually USED BizSpark and their free Azure offering? I've used it for a Windows server just to get stuff up and running that may not run on Linux. I've downloaded and used some of the free MS software. Give Microsoft some credit.

tarblog 13y ago
You don't give credit. You earn it.
- bybjorn 13y ago
  You give somone credit if they have earned it.
- mcgwiz 13y ago
  True, but I think he meant give them a chance. His point is that people seem to be criticizing it without direct experience, especially in a case that seems clearly fair on Azure's part to people who have experience with both Azure and AWS. Generally speaking, how can something earn credit when people are prejudiced against it and won't give it a chance?

ypmagic 13y ago

Great article.

sdaityari 13y ago
Thanks :)

captn3m0 13y ago

I signed up for BizSpark after reading this blog post a while back (I know the author), and I can say, its not as bad as you people are making it sound. Sure, it tries to force MS crap in your face; but if you are diligent enough you can avoid it all. For instance, I'm just using a medium Ubuntu VM, which I can deploy/clone at will in case Azure goes down.

ddmma 13y ago

Is the idea of your startup or the technology you use to build your idea? BizSpark is a program like no other. http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/connectworld.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/connectworld.aspx Leave preconceptions in the past and start building your idea!

unmole 13y ago
Who cares about long term vendor independence? Just get your 'free' hosting and tools from Microsoft NOW! You can always sell off your kidneys to pay for the cost of the service or the cost of switching three years down the line.
- hackerboos 13y ago
  I see this point a lot but who cares about vendor lock-in if it speeds up your 'time to market'. Bizspark is especially beneficial if you were going to use the MS stack anyway or you have experience of it.
- jaegerpicker 13y ago
  Expect Azure is cheaper than AWS and has less lock in. So, what's the point you are trying to make? I'm not a microsoft developer, I'm a python/django and iOS dev, but Azure and BizSpark are pretty great platforms/programs. I don't care if people use them or like them but I'd really prefer if people would at least give some kind of valid reason when they are bashing it.

monkeyspaw 13y ago

Side point - it's likely you had many more "visitors" than the <10 / day indicated in the article. On most sites I run, I see about 10% of my traffic as showing up in Google Analytics. I hypothesize this is because most of the traffic on the internet is bots. Bing Bot is the worst at this. They hammer my sites, send me zero traffic, and don't appear to allow me to control their behavior very well. I get 50x the traffic from google cmp to bing, but google is about 1/3 the hits (when looking @ raw logs).

herokusaki 13y ago
That sounds awful. Can you block it through robots.txt? If not, and if Bing gives you no traffic, you could feed it blank (or just super truncated) pages based on the user agent.

noir_lord 13y ago

Tried to sign up for BizSpark about 18 months ago, small start-up business looking at developing a SaaS system. As a primarily linux web dev I still thought it worth seeing what the MS technologies might offer, they told me to bog off. So my entire company is and will be built around Debian/Apache/Postgres/PHP and Python for now and the foreseeable. (In actual fact it left such a bad taste in my mouth that all non development machines (when I have some lol) will be non-MS entirely aswell).

300bps 13y ago
As a primarily linux web dev I still thought it worth seeing what the MS technologies might offer, they told me to bog off. I keep seeing people post things like this and I cannot imagine how dumb someone has to be to get turned down for BizSpark. They are so amazingly clear in the rules of what you need: 1. A custom domain email address 2. Some semblance of a web site I registered a domain name for $4, made a free Outlook.com email address on it and put up a "Coming Soon!" website. I then spent 5 minutes filling out the application. 4 days later I was approved with no follow up questions. Now I get free Microsoft software for life (you keep your MSDN subscription licenses forever), free Azure hosting for three years and a ton of other benefits. For a $4 domain that I'll be using as a startup and about 10 minutes of my time.

warrenmiller 13y ago

You might not like it after 3 years when you're deeply tied into their software/services and you realise how expensive it can be...

rescendent 13y ago
Its not that expensive; you get a discount for a further 2 years and if after 5 years you aren't making enough money to afford your licences you might just want to start a new company and re-enroll. And that's not being able to afford your licences that you are using beyond the program: "BizSpark Alumni can keep, at no charge, all the software they downloaded during their three years in the program, including a standard configuration of Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server." It would suggest you are doing something wrong if you can't afford what ever extra licences, you need to use passed this and 5 years on...
gamblor956 13y ago
If you can't afford their software or services after 3 years than the problem is that your startup never became a real business. The BizSpark program is intended for people trying to launch new businesses (hence the name). It's not intended for hobby projects or side projects.

bunkerbewohner 13y ago

My startup enrolled for BizSpark 6 months ago and we're super happy so far. Setting up VMs is dead easy and we're running two server instances (small and medium) and geographically redundant cloud storage. Didn't have any problems so far, it just seems to work.

happywolf 13y ago

It always amuses me to see 1) people complain of the need to pay for a service 2) [more amusing point] the free stuff is not good enough. Beggars can't be choosers, if one wants something, earn enough and pay for it. My solutions? There are two: 1) Work long enough to have reasonable amount of savings to fund my start-up, free stuff is nice, but they are sometimes risky. Reason being, how much leverage do you have when you didn't pay for something? 2) Be creative, there are always solutions out there. Writing an article to complain about a free service being not good enough really make me wondering if these 'entrepreneurs' are ready for the real world. My start-up runs on a 512MB shared instance on $9/mth, and so far it meets my need. BizSpark may have good perks, but it is beside the point.

cmircea 13y ago

It's even better - you get an MSDN subscription for up to 10 people, each with $150 Azure credits ($200 first month) and you can use all of them in production. That's $1500.

sdaityari 13y ago
Yes, that's something I haven't tried and it's a luxury that this startup doesn't really need now.

unmole 13y ago

If you're running on an open source stack, Redhat's OpenStack PaaS seems like a good place to start. You get 3 'gears' free for life and its Docker ready.

Maarten88 13y ago

It's great that you can run Ubuntu VM's running Python/Django apps on Azure, as the author has done. However, I think you can get more out of Azure by using its PaaS services. It is also possible to run a Python/django app in an Azure Website Service. The cost is the same, but management and security if the OS is taken care of for you. Upgrades and patches happen automatically. You can setup automated build, test and deployment from Git. You can setup background and maintenance jobs without having to manage cron. You can setup auto scaling of VM's. It saves a lot of work. Of course, this risk of this is lock-in. But the technologies underlying Azure are almost all open. If you're carefull what you use, you can always take your code and run it on a VM in AWS if you want. Of course, you would have to setup/build your own scaling and maintenance processes, using (also proprietary) AWS services. Like Microsoft, Amazon is likewise trying to get you to use proprietary cloud services. If you use S3, Beanstalk, Redshift, Search, you get locked in to AWS the same way Microsoft will lock you when you use SQL Azure, Azure Table Storage or Service Bus. You just need to be be very careful with any dependencies you take on into your startup. That said, I have also had a very good experience with BizSpark. Not only do they give you lot of free stuff, but I they can also connect you with interesting partners internationally, and help your business in unexpected ways.

rescendent 13y ago
Except Microsoft's "lock in" is lighter; if you build using AWS or Google tech; you are using proprietary tech that can only be hosted by them, which is a deep lock in. If you build on Azure tech; you aren't locked into MS being the host of the services; you can run an Azure cloud entirely in your own datacenter; you can use Azure as overflow in a Hybrid model http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/solutions/hybrid-cloud.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/solutions/hybrid... or if you have legal or compliance needs to not host with a US company you can use one of their many partners: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/dec13/12-12cosnpr.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/dec13/12-12co... as the "Cloud OS" provider. They even providing server and datacenter blueprints as part of the Open Compute Project http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/01/27/microsoft-contributes-cloud-server-designs-to-the-open-compute-project.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/01/27... with datacenter rack management software, if you want to build your own datacenter. All their client libraries are even on GitHub https://github.com/WindowsAzure https://github.com/WindowsAzure

darklegend 13y ago

We had a conversation with our BizSpark manager and you can also apply for BizSpark plus. This needs an additional review of your Startup, but if you succeed you get 10.000$ (or 15.000$ - not sure anymore) in Azure credits every month. Quite nice to get some traction at the beginning :-)

_delirium 13y ago
According to this page it's $5.000/mo for the first 12 months: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/plus/default.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/plus/default.aspx Also the front page says only startups who are members of designated startup-accelerator programs can apply, though it's entirely possible that could be waived by your BizSpark manager.
sandGorgon 13y ago
@darklegend - my startup is already part of the BizSpark program, but it seems that the "Plus" program means that you have to go through an accelerator first. Is this requirement still valid - would have loved to apply directly (our core target market includes Windows Desktop software as well)

Patrick_Devine 13y ago

I have no idea how well Azure stacks up to AWS, however, when I read Shaumik's post I couldn't help but think it was some kind of guerrilla marketing tactic conceived by a faceless shill in the inner bowels of Microsoft's marketing department. The What are you waiting for? Sign up for BizSpark already! comment really set my bullshit detector off. Shaumik, did you really take the time to go figure out the URL to their signup page to put in your blog post? Are they paying you for this stuff?