- Initially I was just going to use my existing Lanitek server, but I have another important web site running there, GPRA Upload. Once I had an issue on Monster Cache where I wasn't closing some database connections and it brought down not only Monster Cache, but GPRA Upload too. That convinced me to get Monster Cache its own server.
- At the time, I had just recently attended a seminar on Windows Azure, so I guess I was curious to try it out. And they were offering a 90 day free-trial (or maybe it was 180 day?), so that was good since we were several months away from being ready to launch.
- I had, and maybe still do have, a hope that if Google or Apple ever promote the game then there will be a spike in traffic, and then I could easily increase the server capabilities on a short-term basis, if needed.
I haven't been super happy with Windows Azure for these reasons:
- Its more complicated to use than a normal web server. Some things that took extra time that I can think of off-hand are web Sessions, file uploading, and making backups.
- They keep changing the features. When I signed up, they had pretty decent tech support. Now you have to pay extra for tech support, with the minimum plan being an extra $29 / month
- It hasn't worked perfectly, I've had a couple instances of long down time that I consider their fault.
One instance of down time was yesterday. I noticed in the afternoon that my Monster Cache app wouldn't log in, but I thought it was my phone's issue. When I tried the web site at 9 pm that night, I found the web site wasn't even coming up, but just failing to respond. I started looking for support options, and that's when I found that I no longer had tech support, just billing support. So then I looked for a way to "reboot" the app, since there isn't really a lone server to reboot. That's when I found the CPU monitoring tool. It showed that Monster Cache had been using 86% CPU since mid-afternoon. Here's their chart:
That was very strange since I know that our traffic is VERY low, like only dozens to hundreds of hits per day. There was an option to reboot an instance of a role. I only have one instance, so I rebooted it at about 10 pm. You can see that the CPU went back down to 0% and its been working fine so far today.
As a reminder to myself, the CPU monitoring is found in the "Cloud Services" section of the main management portal. After viewing the graph in the Monitor tab, you do the rebooting on the "Instances" tab. Had to reboot it tonight. It was not responding and the graph was on its way up, but only at 48% so far. I rebooted one other time since this post, so that's at least 3 times in the last 4 1/2 months.
ReplyDelete