Microsoft Azure is a powerful cloud platform with a variety of services, ranging from infrastructure (IaaS) to platform (PaaS) and software (SaaS). However, despite its prominence, many developers, businesses, and IT professionals find Azure to be far from ideal for hosting websites or applications. Azure’s complexity, pricing, and limitations make it less attractive compared to other hosting providers. In this article, we will explore why Azure may not be the best choice for hosting and traditional hosting might be works for you.
Why Azure is not Best Choice to Host Your Website?
1. Complexity and Steep Learning Curve
One of the primary criticisms of Azure is its complexity. The platform offers a vast array of services, and while this can be beneficial for large-scale enterprises, it often becomes overwhelming for small to medium-sized businesses or independent developers. Setting up even simple tasks, such as hosting a website or deploying an app, can require significant technical knowledge and familiarity with the Azure ecosystem.
Steep Learning Curve
The learning curve for Azure is steep due to its reliance on understanding many different services, configurations, and management tools. For example, developers need to navigate through services like Azure App Service, Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Azure Blob Storage—each with its own set of features, pricing models, and complexities. While large corporations may have dedicated IT teams to handle this, smaller businesses often lack the resources to effectively manage and optimize Azure’s complicated infrastructure.
Frequent UI Changes
Azure’s management portal is notorious for frequent updates and changes to its user interface, which can confuse users who rely on consistent workflows. Constant UI updates force users to frequently re-learn how to perform tasks, which can be frustrating and time-consuming.
2. Unpredictable and High Costs
Azure’s pricing structure is another major drawback. Many users find the platform’s costs to be unpredictable and difficult to control, especially for small businesses that need to manage their budgets tightly.
Complicated Pricing Models
Azure charges for nearly every resource you use, which includes virtual machines, data storage, network traffic, and even bandwidth. This granular pricing model can quickly become confusing, and even minor misconfigurations can lead to unexpectedly high bills. Additionally, Azure’s pricing can vary depending on factors such as location, demand, and service tiers, making it even harder to predict costs in the long run.
For example, if you are using virtual machines on Azure, you might be billed based on the instance size, disk space, CPU usage, and network bandwidth. Without careful monitoring, it’s easy to exceed your budget. In contrast, many other hosting providers offer simple, flat-rate pricing that makes it easier to manage expenses.
Hidden Costs
Another major issue is hidden costs. For example, when you scale services up or down, you may not anticipate the cost of related services, such as monitoring, backups, or security features. Many Azure users are surprised by bills for data egress charges (fees for transferring data out of Azure) and traffic costs for handling multiple regions. These fees can quickly add up, especially for websites or applications with high traffic.
3. Performance and Downtime Issues
While Azure is backed by Microsoft’s global network, it is not immune to performance issues and downtime. Like any other cloud provider, Azure experiences outages that can severely impact your business if your application or website relies on constant uptime.
Downtime Events
Over the years, Azure has suffered from several high-profile outages. In one instance, an Azure Active Directory outage impacted users worldwide, leaving them unable to access critical cloud services for hours. Such downtime can have serious consequences for businesses that require continuous availability, such as e-commerce sites or enterprise applications.
Latency Issues
Depending on your geographic region and the availability of nearby Azure data centers, you may experience latency when hosting your application. While Azure has a large network of data centers, its performance can be uneven across different regions. Users have reported that accessing services from certain areas, especially those outside major metropolitan hubs, can lead to slow response times.
In contrast, other hosting providers offer content delivery networks (CDNs) and caching mechanisms that significantly improve performance by distributing content closer to the end user, regardless of location.
4. Vendor Lock-In and Proprietary Systems
Azure is deeply integrated with Microsoft’s proprietary technologies, which can make it difficult to move away from the platform once you’ve built your infrastructure around it. Many businesses find themselves tied to Microsoft’s ecosystem, relying on services like Azure Active Directory, Azure DevOps, and Azure SQL Database.
Limited Flexibility
If you need to migrate to a different cloud provider or hosting platform, you may encounter compatibility issues or the need to rewrite significant portions of your code. Azure’s proprietary tools and APIs can create barriers to exiting the platform, leading to vendor lock-in. This can limit your flexibility and make it difficult to take advantage of newer or better technologies outside of the Microsoft ecosystem.
Traditional Hosting Beat Azure Hosting
1. Traditional Hosting is More Simple and Easy to Manage
In contrast, shared hosting providers are designed to be beginner-friendly. With shared hosting, the hosting company takes care of the server management for you. This includes handling server maintenance, software updates, and security measures, allowing users to focus solely on building and maintaining their website.
With platforms like cPanel and Plesk that come with shared hosting plans, users can manage everything from domain names to email accounts, databases, and file uploads without needing to dive into complex configurations. Shared hosting is a great option for non-technical users who just want to get their website online quickly.
2. Fixed and Affordable Price with Shared Hosting
In contrast, shared hosting is much more affordable and transparent. Hosting companies generally offer fixed pricing plans, with most basic plans starting as low as $3 to $10 per month. This flat-rate pricing makes it easy for users to budget their hosting costs without worrying about hidden fees or surprise charges.
Moreover, shared hosting plans usually come with unlimited bandwidth, free domain registration, and SSL certificates as part of the package. These inclusions can save small businesses hundreds of dollars per year. For startups or small websites that don’t require high-level compute resources, shared hosting is a far more cost-effective solution.
3. Small Traffic Sites? Better Use Shared Hosting
For small businesses, blogs, or personal websites, shared hosting provides more than enough performance at a fraction of the cost. While you share server resources with other users, the typical shared hosting environment is optimized for running WordPress, Joomla, or basic HTML sites without needing advanced configurations.
Modern shared hosting plans also include features like SSD storage, free CDN integration, and performance caching, which are usually sufficient to keep your site running smoothly. Unless your website experiences high traffic volumes or has complex applications, shared hosting can handle the workload efficiently.
4. No Need Maintenance
With shared hosting, the hosting provider takes care of most of the maintenance tasks. From server updates to security patches, the provider ensures that your hosting environment is secure and optimized. Many shared hosting providers also offer 24/7 customer support, often including live chat, email, and phone support, making it easy to get help when you need it.
Additionally, shared hosting companies offer a range of one-click installers for common applications like WordPress, Drupal, or Umbraco, etc allowing you to get your site up and running quickly without technical expertise.
5. Easy to Migrate Anyime You Like
Shared hosting is a more flexible and interoperable environment. Most shared hosting platforms use industry-standard technologies like cPanel or Plesk, making it easy to move your site from one hosting provider to another. Many providers also offer free migration services, ensuring a smooth transition without downtime.
For businesses looking to maintain flexibility and avoid lock-in, shared hosting is a far more accessible option.
3 Best Azure Hosting Alternatives
1. ASPHostPortal
One of the top ASP.NET Core hosting that offer load balancing is ASPHostPortal. A higher server uptime guarantee than most competitors is offered by the VPS hosting platform: 99.95%. Every ASPHostPortal hosting plan boasts powerful Intel Xeon Platinum CPUs and lightning-fast SSD storage.
ASPHostPortal offers cost-effective and adaptable billing options. You can choose the operating system version, amount of RAM, bandwidth, disk space, and processing power that you require for your web hosting environment.
Key Features
- Ultimate scalability with limitless customizations
- Easily add load balancers and firewalls
- Stellar 99.99% uptime guarantee
2. HostForLIFE.eu
At the application level, intelligent load distribution is offered by the HostForLIFE.eu. Individual routing rules, frequent health checks, an integrated listener interface supporting multiple IP addresses, bidirectional communication channels, TLS connection relocation, and the option to configure a warm-up phase are just a few of the features that the managed cloud hosting solution has to offer.
The HostForLIFE.eu Network Load Balancer and the HostForLIFE.eu Application Load Balancer work together. It is possible to extend load balancing and use cases by deploying both HostForLIFE.eu load balancers in a stack. The hosting provider is without a doubt among the best load balancing hosting options and offers an hourly pricing model that is reasonably priced with no hidden fees.
Key Features:
- Cloudflare CDN, DDoS protection, and backups
- Performance-boosting SSDs and cloud flexibility
- Rock-solid reliability with 100% uptime guarantees
3. EasyHostingASP.NET
With the help of EasyHostingASP.net Load Balancers, you can scale your website more quickly and consistently. The cloud hosting platform is very simple to set up and supports HTTP/2 and Proxy Protocol.
Load balancers from EasyHostingASP.NET are affordable, safe, and expandable. That said, EasyHostingASP’s solution is not what you need if you’re searching for a feature-rich cloud load balancing plan. Beginners should use EasyHostingASP.NET Load Balancers.
Key Features
- Auto scaling with premium Intel processors
- No throttling or traffic restrictions, ever
- Deploy your Asp.net application in less than 1 minute
Conclusion
While Microsoft Azure is a powerful cloud platform that excels in large-scale enterprise applications, it is not always the best choice for simple web hosting needs. Its complexity, unpredictable pricing, performance overhead, and maintenance requirements make it overkill for most small to medium-sized websites.
On the other hand, traditional shared hosting offers a cost-effective, user-friendly alternative that covers the essential hosting needs of smaller websites. With fixed pricing, easy management tools, and robust customer support, shared hosting allows users to focus on their websites rather than managing cloud infrastructure.
For individuals and businesses looking for simplicity, affordability, and reliability, shared hosting is often the smarter choice.
