Windows Azure Web Sites

7 Scaling, Configuring, and Monitoring Your Site

IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Understanding your options for scaling your website for performance
• Working with diagnostic logs and troubleshooting your live site
• Exploring other aspects of configuration in your Windows Azure Web Site

Not everyone can come up with that one great website idea, the one that sends you to early retirement as droves of Internet citizens sing the praises of your creation. No, the reality is that most of us will be working well past the age of 111100 (in binary); but that's not to say we won't have our ideas, and some may be quite good. What options do you have to host the site?

• Buy a single server out of savings and hope that at some point you can scale the hardware while dealing with growth.
• Borrow a friend's server and live at his or her mercy when you need changes to DNS, or RAM, or database storage space.
• Rent a Virtual Machine (or VM) through a hosting provider and try to figure out how to scale horizontally down the road.
• Find a rich aunt or uncle (or angel investor) to pay up-front capital costs to put a bank of servers into commission, then hope for traffic.

While none of these are intrinsically bad ideas — and there are certainly other (possibly better) options out there — they all come with certain restrictions or the potential to make the next family gathering quite uncomfortable. Going back for more capital before you've repaid the initial investment can be tricky, and not all virtualization scenarios ...