Now I realized, I shouldn’t have touched this MS Azure cloud again when I received a newsletter from Windows Azure Team. All I did one day last month after I saw that email was created an empty web site, a cloud service, an empty database and a storage. Not a single byte has been put in so far because I still cannot figure out what would the next step be, even to say ‘Hello World”.
Last time I wrote about Azure I have the conclusion that a 200MB database in MS cloud could cost user more than $25,000 each month, so this time I haven’t put a single bit in db01 database I just created.
http://woodaway.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/how-much-does-it-cost-to-store-16kb-data-in-azure/
Now it’s happening again, when my credit card expired by the end of June, they sent me two email today (July 1st), reminding me I should update credit card info and also I owe them $0.20 for the first day of July, for nothing.
The Azure billing detail is more sophisticated than the hydro and gas bill:
- I don’t know why they charged me 0.016129 ConsumeUnits for an empty database, there is nothing in it, but at least it’s consistent everyday.
- The ConsumeUnits of the website are different every day. Why? I have nothing, not even one html file in the web site, what has been consumed differently everyday?
This is what Azure charged in June for the empty services.
And this is what MS cloud charged for July 1st, plus tax I assume.
This could be the reason – I enabled four services in June 8th although I didn’t have time to touch them again, but the SQL service charged me for an empty database, which might have consumed some kilobytes on their virtual hard disk somewhere in the cloud.
The unreasonable part is the SQL service was not even working when I logged in yesterday.
I don’t bother call Microsoft support for the error this time. I called for some other Azure questions last time, it seemed they don’t care. I am not sure if it’s because I told them I wanted to try (preview) Azure from SMB (small & medium businesses) standpoint or else. Bottom line, it’s Microsoft product, if Microsoft people don’t care, why should I?
I just deleted everything under the account, gonna pay a few loonie or toonie to the MS foundation since they claimed I owe them (maybe in fine print somewhere).
Bye Azure!