I am going to start developing web applications that will do almost without money, but I can get it to work with minimal hardware (£ 35 per month on a VPS server).
The only problem is that SQL Server Express SQL code size limits make me feel that if it grows but does not make a lot of money, I will be stung with the high cost of a license.
So, I ask, what is the cheapest way to get another version of SQL Server running on this VPS?
I am looking to buy or rent an instance of SQL Server Web Edition, but it seems very difficult to figure out how to do this. I found this link from a ServerFault question. It says that you can use this link for this.
http://spla-essentials.partners.extranet.microsoft.com/
The question is minimized, what is the cheapest price that someone can buy a license for the web version of SQL Server, which allows you to install it on rented equipment.
The minimum cost of my hosting company for licensing SQL Server is £ 200 per month, which seems like a waste of money. They offer good value and reliability for the VPS itself http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/Virtual-servers/
I know that Azure is an option, but I'm really interested in lowering the cost below Azure. Obviously, if I scaled to such an extent that it would be cheaper for me to go over to this penalty, but I feel that it would be better to keep a fixed cost until a certain size is reached.
I know about Biz Spark, but it doesn't seem to work for these low-margin enterprises.
Should I just bite the bullet and switch to Java for my programming needs, because of this one single fact (I really like working with the Microsoft stack).
Does anyone have any experience with this?
I think this is an important question that needs to be answered, as this can seriously affect the choice of development framework for future web applications.