Thanks to the data accident happened last night with my previous hosting provider, I finally decided to embrace Microsoft Azure as my new hosting provider. I thought the price of Azure Websites would be way more expensive than traditional hosting services, but it turned out that was not true, especially when you were looking for a reliable hosting service with a responsive management console. In fact, although there are so many items that Microsoft Azure can charge you (see http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/overview/), hosting a website with Azure Websites is likely of the same price as traditional hosting services, as long as you are not misled by the “Unlimited Everything” claim made by those services – resources cost money, and if you do need “unlimited” storage, those hosting services will no doubt kill your website and throw you an email saying that you are consuming too many resources blah blah blah.

For those who are also interested in knowing/learning/using Azure, here is a keynote presented by Brad Calder on ASPLOS 2014: http://www.cs.utah.edu/asplos14/keynote1.html, talking about some interesting stuff inside Azure. Brad Calder is currently leading the development of Azure Storage at Microsoft.