Hosting

As Of Date: April 8, 2025

While I was employed by Microsoft to help build Azure, I had $150 worth of Azure credits a month to play around with. I did use those for work related purposes on occasion to test something out, but I mostly used it for side projects. Using those credits for side projects gave me a much better understanding of what it is like to be a hobbyist developer or very small customer in Azure. I stopped receiving those credits after March 2025.

I do really like Azure Functions and Azure Storage. When I first deployed CosmosDB, it had a rather high minimum deployment size that put the price point quite high. There is now a more dynamic pricing plan that costs a tiny fraction of the minimum deployment size price for tiny workloads. Unfortunately, the Compute pricing for individual VMs is quite high. I already have some VMs with OVH and it does seem tempting to switch to DigitalOcean for the sake of vendor diversity.

As Of Date: December 19 2022

I have moved away from Azure Files. I realized a long time ago that data disks was the correct solution for my intended use case. Indeed, I ran into the occasional problem with using Azure Files as a persistently mounted filesystem. The VM itself is still disposable. As long as I can keep the OS disk, then I do not need to do any bits of configuration on a "new" VM. Of course, the data disk gives me additional flexibility to detach my system's data from this VM and re-attach it to a new VM with a fresh OS disk. I should have moved off of Azure Files years ago.

As Of Date: May 12 2018

Unsurprisingly, I use the cloud to host my website. Specifically, I use Microsoft Azure, the cloud that I helped build. My website is serverful — there is a VM that I manage which serves the content. The actual site is not complicated. There is no server side processing. It is boring HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The benefit of the cloud is that the files actually live in Azure Files. It is no big deal if the VM gets nuked. I can mount the storage volume in a new VM. I would need to do a bit of configuration on the new VM but nothing too painful.

I might use ssh access to muck around but, at the end of the day, the machine is disposable. That's the benefit of the cloud.