If I have a Windows Azure site that doesn't get any hits, am I still charged for the website usage? [closed]

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I'm not sure how the pricing of Windows Azure websites works. Lets say I create a website and no one visits it. Am I charged the time.

Then lets say that the total time the server spends computing pages and such during the month is 30 minutes. Do I only pay for 30 minutes or do I pay for the entire month the site was available on their servers?

Answer 1

Windows Azure compute has always been based on hourly billing (analogous to a hotel room: You pay for the night, even if you're not in the room, using 0% of it).

With Windows Azure Web Sites, shared instances are currently free while in preview. If that's what you're currently using, you don't have to worry about being charged. Beyond the 90-day free trial, you'll get an additional 12 months for your shared-instance websites.

Once you go with reserved instances then you're paying for those reserved resources, by the hour. Pricing is similar to Windows Azure Web and Worker Roles (where your application is pushed to Windows 2008 Server virtual machines), except that during the preview, the per-hour pricing is discounted 33%. Detailed pricing breakdown is here.

As others have mentioned, there are other services that will be charged (such as databases, Windows Azure blob/table/queue storage, service bus, bandwidth and others). The free trial includes some bandwidth, database, and storage for free in addition to 10 free shared-instance websites.

Answer 2

They have an option to "Run up to 10 Web Sites for free in a multitenant environment" during the preview, so if you use that you will not pay for the site itself. If you use a VM, you will pay per hour, regardless.

There are also other time-based components, like storage, and other optional components that charge by transaction or request count (CDN, Active Directory, etc.)

Answer 3

Yes, the pricing depends on how many hours your website (i.e. role) is up, not how many hours it is used.

You can try their free-trial to see how they calculate "compute-hours" under the billing section.

The best is still to contact Azure support as they alone can provide authoritative answers.