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There are lots of cheap web hosting services available, but many of the services go down frequently or cannot handle huge requests. I have read that cloud services are always up and you pay only for what you use, but are cloud services expensive for hosting simple application or blogs?

OR i would put my question this way...

If a web developer wants to host his application online which service would be best suited for normal web hosting; Cloud hosting like Windows Azure or Amazon Web Services?

Mr. Mr.
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anix
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  • Not sure everyone would agree that the cloud services are frequently down or cannot handle huge requests but you are correct you do only pay for what you use on the major services, and a simple set up may even be cost free. – Mr. Mr. Jul 09 '12 at 12:57
  • i wont agree cloud services are frequently down.. Amazon only had few hour downtime in whole life cycle .... if i am not mistaken – anix Jul 28 '12 at 04:42

2 Answers2

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Blog:

If you want to host a blog check blogger.com or wordpress.com. Both are free, and you dont have to care about system admin, scaling, cost. You can use custom domain name for free in blogger.com.

App:

If you want to run an application on the cloud there are few options:

PaaS (Platform as a service):

  1. Google Appengine
  2. Heroku
  3. EngineYard

IaaS (Infrastructure as a service):

  1. Amazon webservices (EC2, S3, RDS etc)

Each one offers different OS, Language, pricing. You need to choose based on your need. If you dont expect much traffic, most of them have free tier. Tryout before making a decision.

18bytes
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  • +1 for the variety of different services – Mr. Mr. Jul 09 '12 at 12:51
  • if their is less traffic to the site in initial days how much cost you can expect for the services ?? how is the CPU utilization count in this case. number of hour the CPU was utilized.. is it hour on the clock or total CPU calculated hour utilized by ur site – anix Jul 28 '12 at 04:41
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    Most of them have free tier, check them out. Answer to your questions depends on your usage and needs. So check each provider about the pricing. – 18bytes Jul 28 '12 at 06:07
  • I'd add the free [OpenShift](https://www.openshift.com/) to the list! – niutech Sep 02 '13 at 11:39
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If you are looking at which service provider to go for then you are correct there are a number of options available.

Recently, I attended a talk with Scott Guthrie and he demonstrated the strengths of Azure. I happened to have a friend sat next to me who was developing his site using Amazons App Harbour services. He felt that based on the presentation by Scott Guthrie that the Azure offering was too good an offering to ignore. Apparently the pricing structure (according to Scott Guthrie) for Azure has attempted to match App Harbours, but the features that are available were enough for my friend to decide that the Azure offering was too good not to take advantage of.

Just so you know, my friend is developing an MVC website with a document database (I forget which) with the standard JQuery UI etc.

If you are planning a similar venture then I am sure both services will be sufficient, but after weighing up what is on offer it seems to be obvious that you have more features from Azure than App Harbour.

For a better description see this: Windows Azure or Amazon EC2 for ASP.NET MVC Development?

One thing to note is that there is about to be an update to Azure soon which from my experience will make for a better user experience.

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Mr. Mr.
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