Originally published on my blog at halldorstefans.com on January 13, 2020
About five months ago, around the time .dev domains came available, I wanted to try to set up a simple site on a server. There were two reasons why. Own a .dev domain and create a small Linux project. Recently I've been working up my knowledge in Azure and, because of that, I wondered what options in Azure were available to host my site.
When the .dev domains became available I knew straight away I wanted one (just because :) ) and decided to create a web-server project out of it.
I went for DigitalOcean at the time. The reason was that I found they had great tutorials and seemed more straightforward and less scary than Azure/AWS. I used this tutorial as my starting point. Eventually, everything worked out great, and it was a fun little project.
However, since my interest in Azure has been growing in the last couple of months, and I started to think if Azure had any alternatives available where I didn't need to maintain the server myself.
After I read This is how to easily deploy a static site to Azure after Burke Holland, and the Microsoft tutorial, I found out that Azure wasn't as scary as I thought at first. Once I realised that there was no turning back, I had to try it.
I'm not going to go through the steps of hosting the site in Azure since Burke Holland and Microsoft do a pretty good job doing that, and I recommend those instructions if you want to try it out.
I've now been running my site in Azure storage for two weeks, and the cost is still $0. I kept the Droplet in DigitalOcean during these two weeks, just in case something would have gone wrong or I wanted to turn back to it. But the cost during this time was around $2 (I was using the cheapest Droplet, which was $5/month). Since I was happy with the outcome and this little project of mine was a success, I decided to delete my Droplet and use this solution for now.
Although $5/month is not much, it's always nice to find ways to save money. Plus, I also skip the maintaining server. So, I saved time and money. Win-win.
Thank you for reading. For weekly updates from me, you can sign up to my newsletter.
Top comments (0)