After a week or so on Windows Azure, I must say that I am impressed with Windows Azure. \u00a0The Windows Azure portal is easy to navigate and is really fully featured for any service you’d care to offer.<\/p>\n
Initially, I had a case open for a over a month as my Azure account was being sorted out. \u00a0Upon signing up with a promo code, I changed my LiveID within a few minutes of signing up for Azure. \u00a0This, I fear, was my mistake. \u00a0I went back and forth with support for about 6 weeks before I was finally able to log into the portal. \u00a0It was well worth the wait, however. \u00a0Windows Azure comes as a subscription benefit for various levels of MSDN — in my case I receive a $150\/month Windows Azure credit (which is a recent change within the past month where previously it had a rather complicated benefit). \u00a0With the simplified structure, I can do whatever I’d like — host VMs, websites, media services, storage, SQL and more.<\/p>\n
Starting with websites was incredibly easy as well. \u00a0Azure offers full hosting for websites and has a host of options available. \u00a0There are various guides for developing on Azure, but even simpler was the option to deploy from catalog. \u00a0My initial exploration lead me to deploying Orchard CMS on Windows Azure. \u00a0I was left wanting a bit for various plugins and didn’t really feel the need to extend a CMS as it is a technology I expect to be a bit mature by now. \u00a0 After toying with it a bit, I opted to deploy WordPress. \u00a0Free websites are deployed at yournamechoice.azurewebsites.net, or if you opt for “Shared” or “Standard” mode you can use your own domain. \u00a0After getting a great deal on a .com domain, AtumVirt.com was born.<\/p>\n
Website reporting in Azure is also quite impressive. \u00a0Although my traffic is fairly small now, if it were something that was a concern I’d know exactly when and what was driving my costs. \u00a0All in all, Azure seems to be a solid platform that was much easier to get going than my previous experience with Amazon’s services (which seemed rather labyrinthine just to find the ‘costs’ for their free services at the time).<\/p>\n
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