Ok, I admit, that is a terrible joke, for many reasons. I have been diving into the world of Azure web-hosting for use with our Transfer.Me website project. We need something that works well for hosting a Blazor WebApp so our group decided it might be best to keep everything in the Microsoft family, for better or for worse.
Signing up, I find out right away that there are a lot of free options, especially for students, and new users can even get up to $200 towards their services. This will probably come in handy. They have a free web-hosting service that I found, but it seems that is only for static web-sites, and we will be needing database hosting as well. Thankfully as a student they offer a myriad of database options included with the student account….at least for 12 months. So it appears that we might be able to get away with hosting this thing for free…we’ll see.
Everything about it seems pretty straight forward and simple though, with tutorials offered at many steps of the way. Getting a simple web-hosting setup was fairly easy, but the free tier is certainly limited. It only offers a server with 1GB of RAM and 1GB of storage for the entire app. This will be fine for testing, but we will certainly need more storage than that for transferring larger files. Thankfully I saw some information regarding larger database hosting for students that is included!
Another interesting thing is that the free tier includes only 60min/day of compute time. I am curious to know how that is calculated and enforced. If we go over that, do we get charged money? Or does it just stop working? This is certainly something that I will have to look into. For now though, this will likely be fine to get the concept up and running and we can expand from there.
The Azure Portal was very easy to set up a simple website and took me about 5 minutes. There are several tutorials I found online for this, but honestly it was so simple that it would take more time to read through a tutorial than to just do it.
I now have a working webserver, albeit without any of our code. Now to figure out how to get our code up on the site, it looks like it will be pretty straight forward though!
Onward!
