
Why I love the Microsoft BizSpark Programme - sdaityari
http://theblogbowl.in/your_voice/why-i-absolutely-love-the-microsoft-bizspark-programme/view/
======
goldenkey
You got a bill because you went over the free tier. I've had the same thing
and talked to Amazon and they wiped the bill and credited me with $200 worth
of credit for the inconvenience and misunderstanding.

Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into
Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later.
That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual Studio, other MS
software, so when you are profitable, you pay them through the nose, because
you are locked into proprietary anti-open-source bait.

You weren't diligent, and didn't even reach out to Amazon. Instead you went
with a shitty competitor and we're supposed to applaud that? What's the moral
here? That you're unable to reach out to a company when you feel like you were
taken advantage of? Sorry, Azure is still garbage and AWS is one of the most
advanced and performant cloud platforms available. Amazon still has the best
support of any company in the consumer products and web services industry.

~~~
rwg
_Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren 't locked into
Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later._

BizSpark giving away three years of $150/mo Azure credit is shady, but Amazon
giving away one year of the free tier is not shady?

 _That 's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual Studio, other
MS software, so when you are profitable, you pay them through the nose,
because you are locked into proprietary anti-open-source bait._

You don't have to use the software licenses to make use of the Azure credits
in BizSpark, and Azure will run any Linux distro containing a kernel with
Hyper-V support.

 _Instead you went with a shitty competitor and we 're supposed to applaud
that?_

What's so shitty about Azure again?

 _Sorry, Azure is still garbage_

Why?

 _and AWS is one of the most advanced and performant cloud platforms
available._

Unfortunately, staying in AWS's free tier means never seeing any of that
performance.

~~~
quink
Embrace, extend, extinguish. Justified or not, Microsoft's history makes it
hard for me to trust them.

AWS have wiped over $2000 in excess charges incurred by one of our instances'
data transfer - we set up an alert after that - they've been awesome to us and
we trust them and are now spending more and more every month.

~~~
orf
So they wiped some money you owed for data transfer that most likely cost them
absolutely nothing. Big deal.

~~~
Rapidwire
How many other companies do you think would do that?

~~~
orf
My company would. Bandwidth costs very little (and AWS must make a huge markup
on it).

------
shearnie
I made the switch from AWS to Azure prior to being signed up with BizSpark.
And from my experience is a a whole lot more bang for your buck for what you
get even it you're just spinning up a bog standard VM. And might I add the AWS
micro instance is pretty useless for anything besides having a tiny play.
You'll never even have a test site working properly on t1.micro.

The other thing that swung me is the managed scaling for database and IIS in
Azure where you just tweak a slider to allocate CPU's as required. Note this
works for anything that can run on IIS such as PHP or Node or whatever not
just for ASP.NET.

Now with Bizspark (and albeit fairly insignificant traffic for my startup)
it's lots of bang for no bucks.

At least for three years until we get any decent traction and will get vendor
lock in with MS and get stung by massive SQL licensing costs.

I know there's a lot of bad image for M$, but I honestly and optimistically
believe that "Microsoft <3 Startups".

~~~
curiouscat321
Why would you need to pay SQL licensing costs? Couldn't you use their SQL
storage platform (or Amazon's, or anybody else's)?

~~~
300bps
I've used it both ways. Using SQL licensing is much easier for someone already
used to that. You can't do much with standard SQL tools (ex: Management
Studio) while using an Azure SQL Database. You have to use the web interface.
Backing up is different, restoring is different, designing tables is
different. Copying databases from a local SQL instance to a SQL Azure is not
straight-forward like copying a .bak file and restoring it and there are
features in standard SQL that aren't supported in SQL Azure.

------
rdl
I love BizSpark because it makes setting up new Windows VMs for testing
(browsers, code deployment, etc.) pretty painless - you get at least 2 valid
serial numbers for virtually every Microsoft product ever through the MSDN
subscription, and you get to keep them after the MSDN expires.

I'm also looking at doing some stuff with Windows Phone hardware (not with the
OS, just the hardware...), so there's value in that.

I haven't even touched Azure yet.

~~~
sandGorgon
_and you get to keep them after the MSDN expires_

Are you sure about this ? Any more details (assigned to company/individual,
etc. ) ?

~~~
rdl
It's explicitly in the terms -- you get to keep the licenses for the software
you've downloaded. Presumably they stay with the company which had the
bizspark account.

~~~
Ecio78
[http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/faqs.aspx](http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/faqs.aspx)
has a lot of information about it

------
jtchang
A bunch of you guys complaining about how BizSpark sucks...have any of you
actually USED BizSpark and their free Azure offering?

I've used it for a Windows server just to get stuff up and running that may
not run on Linux.

I've downloaded and used some of the free MS software.

Give Microsoft some credit.

~~~
tarblog
You don't give credit. You earn it.

~~~
mcgwiz
True, but I think he meant give them a chance. His point is that people seem
to be criticizing it without direct experience, especially in a case that
seems clearly fair on Azure's part to people who have experience with both
Azure and AWS. Generally speaking, how can something earn credit when people
are prejudiced against it and won't give it a chance?

------
happywolf
It always amuses me to see 1) people complain of the need to pay for a service
2) [more amusing point] the free stuff is not good enough. Beggars can't be
choosers, if one wants something, earn enough and pay for it.

My solutions? There are two: 1) Work long enough to have reasonable amount of
savings to fund my start-up, free stuff is nice, but they are sometimes risky.
Reason being, how much leverage do you have when you didn't pay for something?
2) Be creative, there are always solutions out there. Writing an article to
complain about a free service being not good enough really make me wondering
if these 'entrepreneurs' are ready for the real world.

My start-up runs on a 512MB shared instance on $9/mth, and so far it meets my
need.

BizSpark may have good perks, but it is beside the point.

------
Maarten88
It's great that you can run Ubuntu VM's running Python/Django apps on Azure,
as the author has done.

However, I think you can get more out of Azure by using its PaaS services. It
is also possible to run a Python/django app in an Azure Website Service. The
cost is the same, but management and security if the OS is taken care of for
you. Upgrades and patches happen automatically. You can setup automated build,
test and deployment from Git. You can setup background and maintenance jobs
without having to manage cron. You can setup auto scaling of VM's. It saves a
lot of work.

Of course, this risk of this is lock-in. But the technologies underlying Azure
are almost all open. If you're carefull what you use, you can always take your
code and run it on a VM in AWS if you want. Of course, you would have to
setup/build your own scaling and maintenance processes, using (also
proprietary) AWS services.

Like Microsoft, Amazon is likewise trying to get you to use proprietary cloud
services. If you use S3, Beanstalk, Redshift, Search, you get locked in to AWS
the same way Microsoft will lock you when you use SQL Azure, Azure Table
Storage or Service Bus. You just need to be be very careful with any
dependencies you take on into your startup.

That said, I have also had a very good experience with BizSpark. Not only do
they give you lot of free stuff, but I they can also connect you with
interesting partners internationally, and help your business in unexpected
ways.

~~~
rescendent
Except Microsoft's "lock in" is lighter; if you build using AWS or Google
tech; you are using proprietary tech that can only be hosted by them, which is
a deep lock in.

If you build on Azure tech; you aren't locked into MS being the host of the
services; you can run an Azure cloud entirely in your own datacenter; you can
use Azure as overflow in a Hybrid model [http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/server-cloud/solutions/hybrid...](http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-
cloud/solutions/hybrid-cloud.aspx) or if you have legal or compliance needs to
not host with a US company you can use one of their many partners:
[http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/news/press/2013/dec13/12-12co...](http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/news/press/2013/dec13/12-12cosnpr.aspx) as the "Cloud OS" provider.

They even providing server and datacenter blueprints as part of the Open
Compute Project
[http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/01/27...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/01/27/microsoft-
contributes-cloud-server-designs-to-the-open-compute-project.aspx) with
datacenter rack management software, if you want to build your own datacenter.

All their client libraries are even on GitHub
[https://github.com/WindowsAzure](https://github.com/WindowsAzure)

------
bunkerbewohner
My startup enrolled for BizSpark 6 months ago and we're super happy so far.
Setting up VMs is dead easy and we're running two server instances (small and
medium) and geographically redundant cloud storage. Didn't have any problems
so far, it just seems to work.

------
3pt14159
Eh. Cloud66 + Digital Ocean is cheap enough. I'd rather go with someone that
doesn't need marketing tricks to get me onto their servers.

~~~
sergiotapia
Sorry for the bother, hopefully you can help me clear something up. Is Cloud66
a tool that I can use to set up a blank VPS?

I _can_ configure my own VPS (DigitalOcean) but it's a pain in the ass and
it's always different for every box.

I've looked into Chef and it seems half-assed where recipes work on Ubuntu
12.04 x64 but not on Ubuntu 12.10 x86, you see? Fixes some problems, but just
gives me other problems.

I want something where I can check some boxes and say give me a PostgreSQL
database with this master username-password.

Configuring nginx for me with this folder as the root website container and
install ruby 2.0.0 and rails. My needs are basic, but it's odd that nothing
out there exists like this. PHP has XAMPP which install everything you need.

~~~
grey-area
Look into Ansible, docker, etc. there are many options which do what you
describe above

------
captn3m0
I signed up for BizSpark after reading this blog post a while back (I know the
author), and I can say, its not as bad as you people are making it sound.
Sure, it tries to force MS crap in your face; but if you are diligent enough
you can avoid it all.

For instance, I'm just using a medium Ubuntu VM, which I can deploy/clone at
will in case Azure goes down.

------
ddmma
Is the idea of your startup or the technology you use to build your idea?
BizSpark is a program like no other.
[http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/connectworld.aspx](http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/connectworld.aspx)

Leave preconceptions in the past and start building your idea!

~~~
unmole
Who cares about long term vendor independence? Just get your 'free' hosting
and tools from Microsoft NOW! You can always sell off your kidneys to pay for
the cost of the service or the cost of switching three years down the line.

~~~
hackerboos
I see this point a lot but who cares about vendor lock-in if it speeds up your
'time to market'.

Bizspark is especially beneficial if you were going to use the MS stack anyway
or you have experience of it.

------
sheetjs
Previous discussion about bizspark and free azure access:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5293098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5293098)

------
noir_lord
Tried to sign up for BizSpark about 18 months ago, small start-up business
looking at developing a SaaS system.

As a primarily linux web dev I still thought it worth seeing what the MS
technologies might offer, they told me to bog off.

So my entire company is and will be built around Debian/Apache/Postgres/PHP
and Python for now and the foreseeable.

(In actual fact it left such a bad taste in my mouth that all _non_
development machines (when I have some lol) will be non-MS entirely aswell).

~~~
300bps
_As a primarily linux web dev I still thought it worth seeing what the MS
technologies might offer, they told me to bog off._

I keep seeing people post things like this and I cannot imagine how dumb
someone has to be to get turned down for BizSpark. They are so amazingly clear
in the rules of what you need:

1\. A custom domain email address

2\. Some semblance of a web site

I registered a domain name for $4, made a free Outlook.com email address on it
and put up a "Coming Soon!" website. I then spent 5 minutes filling out the
application. 4 days later I was approved with no follow up questions.

Now I get free Microsoft software for life (you keep your MSDN subscription
licenses forever), free Azure hosting for three years and a ton of other
benefits. For a $4 domain that I'll be using as a startup and about 10 minutes
of my time.

------
monkeyspaw
Side point - it's likely you had many more "visitors" than the <10 / day
indicated in the article. On most sites I run, I see about 10% of my traffic
as showing up in Google Analytics. I hypothesize this is because most of the
traffic on the internet is bots.

Bing Bot is the worst at this. They hammer my sites, send me zero traffic, and
don't appear to allow me to control their behavior very well. I get 50x the
traffic from google cmp to bing, but google is about 1/3 the hits (when
looking @ raw logs).

~~~
herokusaki
That sounds awful. Can you block it through robots.txt? If not, and if Bing
gives you no traffic, you could feed it blank (or just super truncated) pages
based on the user agent.

------
cmircea
It's even better - you get an MSDN subscription for up to 10 people, each with
$150 Azure credits ($200 first month) and you can use all of them in
production. That's $1500.

~~~
sdaityari
Yes, that's something I haven't tried and it's a luxury that this startup
doesn't really need now.

------
warrenmiller
You might not like it after 3 years when you're deeply tied into their
software/services and you realise how expensive it can be...

~~~
rescendent
Its not that expensive; you get a discount for a further 2 years and if after
5 years you aren't making enough money to afford your licences you might just
want to start a new company and re-enroll.

And that's not being able to afford your licences that you are using beyond
the program: "BizSpark Alumni can keep, at no charge, all the software they
downloaded during their three years in the program, including a standard
configuration of Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server."

It would suggest you are doing something wrong if you can't afford what ever
extra licences, you need to use passed this and 5 years on...

------
mani04
How about Google App Engine for startups? They give a free tier, which I
presume is free for life as long as the web application stays within quota.

Ofcourse there is lock-in, there is no free lunch anywhere! But it should be
ok for startups with no capital, who just want to figure out their business
model. Once the idea is validated, they can always learn from the experience,
and rewrite the application if platform absolutely needs to be changed.

Disclaimer: I don't get paid by Google for writing this, though I am trying to
do something with google app engine (python) and that may lead to some bias on
my side :-)

~~~
tphan
I don't think it's the same. BizSpark is the equivalent of Google given you
free access to their entire Cloud Platform, e.g. Compute Engine, App Engine,
Cloud SQL, free upgrades of OS X and free copies of of IntelliJ IDEA... for
three years.

~~~
mani04
Agreed. It is not a fair comparison, BizSpark probably provides a lot more.

But for a startup with only developers and zero capital, App Engine still
provides a great platform to get started. And also, there is no need to apply
and get accepted, everyone gets the free quota.

Let me change my initial comment - for those who didn't get into BizSpark and
who have run out of their free AWS quota can consider Google App Engine for
their experiments :-)

------
unmole
If you're running on an open source stack, Redhat's OpenStack PaaS seems like
a good place to start. You get 3 'gears' free for life and its Docker ready.

------
darklegend
We had a conversation with our BizSpark manager and you can also apply for
BizSpark plus. This needs an additional review of your Startup, but if you
succeed you get 10.000$ (or 15.000$ - not sure anymore) in Azure credits every
month. Quite nice to get some traction at the beginning :-)

~~~
_delirium
According to this page it's $5.000/mo for the first 12 months:
[http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/plus/default.aspx](http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/plus/default.aspx)

Also the front page says only startups who are members of designated startup-
accelerator programs can apply, though it's entirely possible that could be
waived by your BizSpark manager.

------
pbreit
The best thing about BizSpark is free software. If you want low priced servers
go to Digital Ocean.

------
Patrick_Devine
I have no idea how well Azure stacks up to AWS, however, when I read Shaumik's
post I couldn't help but think it was some kind of guerrilla marketing tactic
conceived by a faceless shill in the inner bowels of Microsoft's marketing
department.

The _What are you waiting for? Sign up for BizSpark already!_ comment really
set my bullshit detector off. Shaumik, did you really take the time to go
figure out the URL to their signup page to put in your blog post? Are they
paying you for this stuff?

------
ypmagic
Great article.

~~~
sdaityari
Thanks :)

------
tantalor
@sdaityari Please fix: datelines and bylines go at the top of the article, not
the bottom.

~~~
sdaityari
First thing in my Todo list.

