Difference Windows Azure and GoDaddy

Question

What are all the differences between Microsofts Window's azure and web hosting companies like GoDaddy, hostgator ?

Answer 1

Here are a few key differences to consider:

• Server usage. With a hoster like GoDaddy, servers are shared resources, and there's no way to figure out (or limit) the number of tenants sharing a given server with your app. With Azure, a given server, with its 8 cores, is allocated to specific VMs. At most, 8 virtual machines will be deployed to a given server.
• SLA. With a shared-hoster like GoDaddy, there's no built-in way to scale your app, or to ensure availability with multiple servers running your app. With Azure, you can easily scale to 2 or more instances, ensuring at least 99.95% availability.
• Virtual servers. As a clarification to the point above: GoDaddy now offers virtual servers, with cost starting at roughly $30 per month. However, this offering does not provide any scaling support.
• Durable storage. Aside from SQL Azure (GoDaddy provides SQL Server hosting), Azure provides tables, blobs and queues, each triple-replicated. Further, Azure can deploy a new SQL Azure instance in a few seconds. SQL Azure is also triple-replicated.
• Monitoring and diagnostics infrastructure. Azure provides a diagnostics infrastructure to capture things like performance counters, queue sizes, custom log files, etc. and consolidate them into easily accessible/queryable table and blob storage. You can then build app-monitoring apps around this set of diagnostics. Also, the Azure fabric itself monitors your application's health. In the event of a failed server, for instance, your app is restarted on another server automatically. I'm unaware of any automated health monitoring and recovery system built into cheap/shared hosting solutions such as those offered by GoDaddy.
• Additional services on-demand. In Azure, you have access to several consumable services, such as SQL Azure, service bus, scalable storage (blobs, tables, queues), access control, caching (going live in 2011), and Reporting Services (going live in 2011).

Answer 2

Azure is like AWS or Google App Engine. They have tons of servers, you buy (cheap) time on them, and serve from them. It's not so much a replacement for webhosting as it is a replacement for a small datacenter.

Your personal website probably doesn't need the kind of on-demand scalability that cloud computing can provide, but a Web startup that can't invest in a datacenter might - and depending on a lot of factors, the economics might work out in favor of it. But perhaps not.

Webhosts are great for static or dynamic content, or databases and so forth. AWS/Azure/GAE are great for when your demand is twice what you'd expected, so you adjust the little slider.

Answer 3

GoDaddy is simply a web hosting company where as Windows Azure is a cloud hosting company.

Usually cloud hosting companies provide different levels of services namely, Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Usually cloud services are metered and you pay for what you use. e.g. your compute resources (CPU cores), storage, bandwidth usage are all metered and charged against your account. This is not the case in web hosting where you just select a plan for hosting.

The other important difference in Cloud hosting is elastic and scalable instantly. You can add CPU cores, hard disk storage, bandwidth and any other computing resource by just running few commands.

You can event create a new Virtual Machine (Server) instantly with few clicks, manage and have full control over your infrastructure requirements. It allows you to scale on demand.

Answer 4

The key difference between Azure and GoDaddy lies in their flexibility, features, security and reliability of which Azure comes on top.