AppHarbor vs. Azure Web Sites

AppHarbor is Cool…

So I have a client’s web site running MVC4 hosted in AppHarbor.  It costs about 10$ per month to host this simple little site on AppHarbor.  One of the coolest selling points about AppHarbor was that I could simply commit the changes to github and the code would be automatically deployed to the web server.

AppHarbor says that the reason to use AppHarbor is – “AppHarbor lets you instantly deploy and scale .NET applications using your favourite versioning tool. Installing add-ons is just as easy.”

I totally agree – that is a great reason – and it’s very easy to auto deploy with AppHarbor.

But – I Think I Like Azure Web Sites Better…

Today I took the same web site, and enabled Azure Web Sites for my Azure account, and in < 10 minutes I had the same code running in Azure.  Pretty Amazing…

I simply push my local files to my azure remote repo and bam – web site deployed.  When / if Azure can hook into private repo’s – I will likely go that route.

Setting up Azure Web Sites and integrating it with GitHub was even easier than using AppHarbor.  I spent more time with AppHarbor compared to Azure Web Sites.

So What…

The price of each platform is roughly the same – both are really easy to implement – so who cares.  The customer has a gym to run – not an IT infrastructure or platform to manage.  So – why would I suggest Azure over AppHarbor.

Based on the types of platform and infrastructure services that my customer is likely to consume – and knowing the kind of maintenance and support that they will need in the future – I think that aligning my customer in the Azure Platform is probably a better fit for my them.

I think that Azure has potentially more platform options and likely will offer more services (in the future) than AppHarbor or its affiliates.

With Azure everything (the platform & services) will likely be in one place and more centralized – where as with AppHarbor or something else – it seems like many platform options and service offerings are fragmented.

To be fair to AppHarbor – I havent tried using any extra services – so it just appears fragmented.

The Last Question…

Now that the features of Azure are directly competing with what was cool about AppHarbor – I wonder if AppHarbor will remain relevant…

 

Online Artifacts…

Great Improvements to Azure Web Sites

Using Custom Domains, CNAMEs, and Aliases in Azure Web Sites

Must Read => Publishing a WebSite with Git