ASPHostPortal VS Windows Azure

Nowadays, modern websites need a lot more power and flexibility than they did just a few short years ago. In the respond to this need, in February 2010 Microsoft released it’s cloud computing platform Windows Azure. Windows Azure is a set of services that gives .NET developers the tools to build applications that run on a cloud. For newbies in the web hosting industry, understanding how Windows Azure works seems complicated because you need to understand about cloud computing. If you’re looking for a hosting provider, make sure that you truly know about your hosting candidates, what they provide and what parts they’re good at. In this article, we will compare Windows Azure with one of the best Microsoft’s third party web hosting provider, ASPHostPortal. Which one fits your hosting need? Just continue reading this article.

ASPHostPortal VS Windows Azure Overview

ASPHostPortal.com is Microsoft No #1 Recommended Windows and ASP.NET Spotlight Hosting Partner in United States. They provide a lot of kind web hosting types such as: Windows hosting, Linux hosting, reseller hosting and many more. As a technology focused web host, their web hosting packages are designed to support popular web development technologies. Windows and ASP.NET hosting are at the core of our business practice. Also, they have over 10 years combined experience in .NET, PHP, Network Administration, System Integration and related technologies to support mission critical hosting for applications built on these platforms. Their service is trusted worldwide and they have served more than 10,000 customers in 5 different continents. 

Windows Azure is a cloud computing platform developed by Microsoft that can be used to build and host online Web applications through Microsoft data centers. Windows Azure was originally codenamed “Red Dog” and was initially called “Windows Cloud” when it first launched in October 2008. There are three main divisions of the Windows Azure service: Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS, or virtual machines), web hosting (for mostly static sites) and platform-as-a-service. Windows Azure is designed to support a number of platforms and programming languages. Some of the languages supported are extensible markup language (XML), representational state transfer (REST), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Ruby, Eclipse, Python and PHP.

ASPHostPortal VS Windows Azure Comparison: Which One Fits Your Hosting Need?

In order to help you choose the best solution for your hosting needs, we have compiled the following comparison based on our opinion. For comparison’s sake, we’re reviewing the cloud hosting plan from ASPHostPortal and the platform-as-a-service division in Windows Azure as it is most similar to other products in the cloud hosting niche.

ASPHostPortal VS Windows Azure: Pricing & Features

• 6-Months pay monthly
• 12-Months pay monthly
• Starting from $500/mo

ASPHostPortal releases four Windows hosting plans called Host Zero, Host One, Host Two and Host Three at the prices starting from $2.00/month. They offer you three types of Windows hosting include shared, cloud hosting and dedicated servers. Three billing cycles with different prices are available in their Windows hosting package, you can choose between 3-months, 1-year and 3-years payment methods. All of their hosting plan include unlimited websites, huge bandwidth and disk space, SQL Server 2008/2012/2014, dedicated application pool, support UTF-8 Domains & SSD. Not only that, ASPHostPortal provides their costumers a freedom to choose the data center from 12 different countries accross the globe. What’s more, they gives you 30-days money back guarantee if you’re not satisfied with their hosting service. You can see the detail information by visiting their official website.

In another case, Windows Azure offers pricing based on usage (Pay As You Go). You can choose between two billing cycles: monthly and annualy. If you choose annualy you can get 5% discount on Azure services with minimum payment of $500 per month. Their application service brings together everything you need to create web and mobile apps for any platform and any device. The Free and Shared plans allow you to host your apps in a shared environment, while Basic, Standard, and Premium plans provide Virtual Machines dedicated to your plan. You can host multiple apps and domains in each instance you deploy within your plan. You can see the detail information about each plans here.

From the explanation above, it’s clear that Windows Azure has more expensive hosting price because of the high configuration server and resources that they used. Windows Azure has a healthy feature set, offering all the basic tools you’ll need to get your application up and running without the administrative hurdles you’d face by configuring your own server. Their platform-as-a-service handles all of the administrative tasks involved in setting up, configuring, updating and maintaining a web server. Each of these is an actual server running in a virtual environment, referred to as “instances.” Your application is divided into two parts, each served by a separate web or worker role. The web role instances respond to HTTP requests and make your website faster by speeding up page delivery times, web transaction processing and so on. Worker role instances handle message and background job processing, such as asynchronous processing of emails, large database transactions and computing-heavy tasks like data processing and indexing.

For a newbie who only runs a small website, it’s very hard to understand how Windows Azure works. Windows Azure is more suitable to the people who runs a large business application or website with high traffic. Moreover, the price that are very expensive makes the potential costumer think twice to use Windows Azure as their hosting partner. That’s why some of great companies (BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, etc) are using Windows Azure, it’s because only a large companies with huge budget can covered the price offered by Windows Azure. So, we recommend you to use third party web hosting provider like ASPHostPortal if you want to run a small website with low traffic, you don’t need to worry because you can upgrade your hosting plan if sometimes your website started to grow. They are also offer you an affordable price that are suitable with your budget.

ASPHostPortal VS Windows Azure: Help & Support

ASPHostPortal makes customers well-prepared with 24×7 costumer service via email ticket and live chat. As for the support efficiency, ASPHostPortal.com makes sure that their clients get the fastest speed possible by using only top quality bandwidth providers. Also, they guarantees the highest quality of product, top security, support popular web development technologies and unshakeable reliability. ASPHostPortal.com always carefully choose high-quality server, networking, and infrastructure equipment to ensure the up-most reliability. In addition, putting up a complex website is sometime challenging and requires programming knowledge. Since ASPHostPortal.com works together with many programmers and developers, they can afford to offer basic programming support free of charge. Besides, for customers who want to gain some knowledge of hosting in advance, they can check the knowledge base on their web hosting article and tutorial blog.

In the other hand, Windows Azure makes scaling simple with its division of web and worker instances. As mentioned earlier, these roles handle different jobs with respect to your web application. Azure does explicitly support a handful of popular languages: PHP, Java, Node.js, Python and ASP.NET. While any other programming language could be used with their platform, it would require support from an open-source project dedicated to running that language on Windows Azure’s infrastructure. Microsoft does a great job of supporting Windows Azure by offering email and phone support for paying subscribers. However, it still comes at an additional cost with support packages being offered in tandem with hosting plans. if you have question about Windows Azure service, you can easily gets the answer at Windows Azure community.

Conclusion

So, which provider fits your hosting needs? ASPHosPortal or Windows Azure? To make it easier for you choosing the right solution, we have divided some differences in table below: