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My Azure websites are down a lot, four outages (30 minutes - 3 hours) in the past 30 days. I only use one small standard website and one web SQL DB in US West so I can't expect 99.5%. This week (a few days ago and currently), 503 errors were / are the problem, but I also experienced substantial DB downtimes at other occasions.

My question is: what can I do (with hopefully not too much additional costs and effort) to raise stability? Which measures did other Azure users try? Would this have prevented the 3 hour downtime last Monday?

TvdH
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2 Answers2

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There are (at least) three things you can do:

  1. Scale your website so that you have 2 instances running (How to Scale Websites);
  2. Deploy a another copy of the website in a different region, and use traffic manager to Load Balance them (Traffic Manager Overview)
  3. Create another instance of the database, and sync them (Getting Started with Azure SQL Data Sync)
Andrej Kyselica
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Brendan Green
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  • Good summary, thanks. Do you know if this will about double my costs or will I get away with less? – TvdH Jul 03 '14 at 11:25
  • I'd like to provide an answer, but the pricing website doesn't really make it very clear as to the additional cost for additional instances. I'm having a look at my setup to see if I can work it out. Obviously running a deployment in a different region would double the cost. – Brendan Green Jul 03 '14 at 11:36
  • @sabbour Care to elaborate? – Brendan Green Jul 07 '14 at 21:48
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    @BrendanGreen Websites give you a 99.9% uptime guarantee, regardless of the number of instances deployed. So simply scaling beyond 1 instance wouldn't improve availability (or avoid that downtime). What could benefit them is deploying in another datacenter and setting up Traffic Manager as you suggested. – sabbour Jul 09 '14 at 11:40
  • @BrendanGreen point 1 gives you better throughput as now you will have more than one instance serving your site – Jonas Stawski Mar 11 '16 at 19:56
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I'd like to point out that with Websites, you get a 99.9% availability for websites running is Basic and Standard mode regardless of the number of instances deployed. You can view the SLA document here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=301329&clcid=0x409

Regarding the 503 errors you experiences, this was an intermittent issue http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/#history

sabbour
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