Azure is our preferred platform for secure, reliable and scalable hosting of Umbraco base websites, but for many clients it can be challenging to budget for, as one size definitely doesn’t fit all, and so pricing can vary quite considerably. The Microsoft Azure Pricing Calculator can help, as it enables you to model the costs of different Azure components but it does require technical expertise to build the right model. In this article we’ll look at some of the factors affecting the price of Azure hosting for Umbraco.

Simple single instance hosting

The simplest Use Case for Umbraco hosting on Azure is running a single instance of Umbraco - meaning effectively a single server is used to edit Umbraco and to serve content to end-users of the site. In this case we recommend using Azure App Service with a single instance as it reduces the cost of maintenance and management of your Umbraco hosting.

You will also require some Azure storage to hold Umbraco media files like images and PDFs, and an Azure SQL Database to store the Umbraco database.

The biggest cost by far is the App Service Plan needed to run the site, and the bigger the instance size the more the site will cost. A P3V1 App Service Plan usually provides sufficient capacity to serve at least 160,000 page views per month.

You can expect to pay around £200 ex VAT per month for an App Service Plan, Blob Storage and Azure SQL Database.

Scalable load balanced hosting

While App Service provides a 99.95% uptime guarantee there remains a potential for sites to become unavailable due to issues in the hosting infrastructure such as the failure of a single server. For an e-commerce site turning over £5m in sales per year, that equates to £xx lost sales per month on average.

Where the business case is made for a higher up time, then implementing Umbraco in a load balanced configuration using App Service is a very cost effective solution. You will require additional Azure resources including Azure Redis Cache and an additional App Service Plan to host an individual instance running Umbraco for editing.

Expect to spend around £500 per month excluding VAT for a 2 node P1V2 cluster for serving the front end of the site, and additional P1V2 node in a separate App Service Plan for the editing server, which should exceed the pageviews per month of the single instance node outlined above.

Getting help

Identifying which hosting provider is right for your organisation and it’s Umbraco site, is a difficult issue for Marketing Managers who may not want to delve deeper into the the technical issues around hosting infrastructure.

The team at Carbon Six Digital can help with this, by working with Marketing and IT teams to understand requirements, make recommendations and if necessary support the migration process.