.NET PaaS (Platform as a service) seems to have 2 major vendors at the time of writing. Microsoft Azure and AppHarbor.
[EDIT: Please see the paragraph below. I'd like to weaken the caveats expressed here. I've had more time to analyze the situation and talk to Rune Sorenson over at Appharbor]
We were having a good time using AppHarbor until we deployed SSL on our website. Now, I am thinking of moving from Appharbor to Azure because of SSL woes on AppHarbor. This post applies to you
- If you are considering a platform to pick (Microsoft Azure or not)
- If you want to have a custom domain (like www.example.com)
By default, AppHarbor does SNI SSL (which is not supported by many mobile browsers and older browsers especially on Windows XP. I have gotten warnings with Google Chrome version 13 with alarming regularity on Windows XP).
[EDIT: Heroku does state that SNI SSL is buggy with Chrome. Basically SNI SSL is shitty. Just don't use it. Its ok for prototyping though.]
When I contacted AppHarbor support, they proposed a service which costs $100 a month for an IP based SSL. (They say its due to Amazon's EC2 pricing for an public IP). The cited model here is Heroku which also charges $100 a month for IP based SSL.
While I do like AppHarbor quite a bit, $100 per month just for SSL seems quite high to me. I exchanged a few tweets with Aaron Stannard about Azure and SSL.
1. Azure doesn't seem to be charging extra for SSL.
2. Azure's SSL worked fine on all the browsers on Windows XP.
So $100 a month buys you one small compute instance at most cloud providers. We already use GitHub BitBucket and have an internal Jenkins build server. I am guessing we'll roll our own deploy for Azure and move on.
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EDIT: Actually I'd like to weaken the caveat.
I simply love using Appharbor. Even with the pricing caveat.
What is AppHarbor giving away for free:
- One shared compute instance.
- The deployment is insanely quick and frictionless.
- We use mercurial, but if you use git, they also run your unit tests. (Not sure if they run unit tests for mercurial folks. We have our internal build server, so we don't bother).
- Rune of AppHarbor and I exchanged some emails:
* Hostname based SSL is $50 a month on Appharbor.
* IP based SSL is $100 a month on Appharbor.
* Heroku has $20 a month for hostnamed based SSL and Microsoft Azure is free for hostname based SSL.
- Rune specifically mentioned prices might come down in the future. I sincerely hope they do.
We run some part of our service on Microsoft Azure as well:
- We used Azure for a heterogenous situation. We had to run a JAVA process for an API call to an external vendor*. Appharbor doesn't support JAVA.
- With BizSpark, Azure hosting is free for us at this time (for our needs).
So even after competing against BizSpark free giveaways of Azure compute instances, Appharbor is still my number one choice for a frictionless deploy experience.
* External vendor is the Government of India: We are forced to use a JAVA API (IKVM.NET did not work for certain packages we had to depend on). So we couldn't be all .NET.