7 ms·

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 cred

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.

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.