Resale Azure Website Services

Question

I am building a SaaS application for the niche industry. The application is archived in such a way that each subscriber receives his own instance of the application (for example, to configure settings). It is basically a copy of website files (ASP.NET MVC material) and an SQL database. Simple enough.

I’m thinking about switching to Windows Azure - my costs for hardware colocation have increased (about 450 GByr per month now, and then the cost of acquiring new equipment, as well as the time it takes to manage everything). The Windows Azure Platform-as-a-Service represents significant cost savings, not only in terms of money, but I don’t have to spend time doing housekeeping (or messing around with a third-party Dell support group when the motherboard dies).

Remember that I’m talking about PaaS, I’m not interested in using virtual machines because they have the same maintenance problems as physical servers.

So, one service that I / was considering offering to my customers was also web hosting and Hosted Exchange. Both of these services should have been offered from my hosted hardware, but with Azure without virtual machines, I have no way to create arbitrary websites in IIS.

Windows Azure does provide simple web hosting services, and I could use this to sell web hosting to my end users, but I cannot find any resources on the Internet that say if Microsoft permits it.

As for Hosted Exchange - Microsoft does not offer Exchange-on-Azure (unless you bring your SPLA license for a virtual machine with Exchange), but if I go in this direction I can completely stop self-management and just resell the Hosted Exchange service with a white label .

Returning to websites, does anyone know if I can directly blame other people for creating / managing Azure sites on their behalf?

Answer 1

As far as I know, there is nothing that prevents you from doing this from the MSFT point of view, since the SAAS provider you will manage everything for the end client, you will just use Azure PAAS as a hosted environment and manage your SASS Applications yourself. You have several options: cloud services (web and work) or Windows Azure websites (WAWS - which have a common or reserved model), check out this blog post to find out what best suits your needs: http : //blogs.msdn.com/b/silverlining/archive/2012/06/27/windows-azure-websites-web-roles-and-vms-when-to-use-which.aspx

Depending on your requirements and, obviously, price, choose the model that best suits you. * Note that shared WAWS instances currently do not allow the creation of custom domains (future roadmap).

As for the Hosted Exchange, there is a potential office 365 here, MSFT has a SAAS offer already, you can be a system integrator (SI) to get it, food for thought ...

NTN