3 Months Windows Azure Trial Disabled in 3 Weeks

Question

My 3 months trial account Windows Azure has already been disabled in 3 weeks. How's that possible? I had nothing on my project, just a simple Asp.Net web page.

I don't think anybody knew my page and made constant requests.

I can't find a statistics section on Management Portal to check what was my traffic...etc.

Does anybody know where I can check my Hosted Service's statistics?

Thanks

Answer 1

You aren't charged based on access to a hosted service (i.e. compute instance). As long as you have something deployed there, you are charged. No one can ever go to it and it still costs you money.

At the portal, you have to delete whatever hosted services you have there in order to preserve credits. For example if you had up both a Production and a Staging instance, they would charge you compute hours for both. You have to actually delete the instances in order to conserve compute hours on your bill.

As for stats, the only way you can get access stats that I know of is by using the azure diagnostics features. They used to have a lot more detail on their bills (in / out transfers, etc) but the bills are a lot shorter now.

Answer 2

The trial provides 750 compute hours monthly. Once you deploy your app, the meter is ticking. That is, as long as something is deployed, it's a metered resource. Whether consuming 0% or 100% cpu/network/memory, you pay hourly.

Now: If you deployed a single Small instance for your asp.net site, you shouldn't have consumed 750 hours in 3 weeks. Is it possible you deployed with Medium instances? Or deployed with 2 Small instances? Do you have more than one Role in your deployment (since each would have at least one instance)?

One bit of advice I give, when doing dev work: at the end of the day, when you're not actively working on a project, delete the deployment (you can always re-deploy to the same place later). This helps save tremendously on consumed hours.