Once again, Microsoft proved that it values its customers, either big enterprise or small startups. We’re a small private-held business and I personally have a major role in it as I’m one of the founders. Recently, I’ve been giving some pretty nice presentations and a bunch of sessions for Microsoft Hellas about Windows Azure and Cloud computing in general.
I was using my CTP account(s) I have since PDC 08 and I had a lot of services running there from times to times all for demo purposes. But with the 2nd commercial launch wave, Greece was included and I had to upgrade my subscription and start paying for it. I was ok with that, because MSDN Premium subscription has 750 hours included/month, SQL Azure databases and other stuff included for free. I went through the upgrade process from CTP to Paid, everything went smoothly and there I was waiting for my CTP account to switch on read-only mode and eventually “fade away”. So, during that process, I did a small mistake. I miscalculated my instances running. I actually missed some. That turned out to be a mistake that will cost me some serious money for show-case/marketing/demoing projects running on Windows Azure.
About two weeks ago, I had an epiphany during the day and I was like “Oh, crap.. Did I turned that project off? How many instance do I have running?”. I logged on the billing portal and, sadly for me, I was charged like 4500 hours because of the forgotten instances and my miscalculation. You see, I’ve did a demo about switch between instance sizes and I had some instances running like big VMs. That’s four (4) times the price per hour.
It was clearly my mistake and I had to pay for it (literally!). But then I tweeted my bad luck to help others avoid the same mistake and the thing I was been warning my clients all this time and some people from Microsoft got interested in my situation, I explained what happened and we ended up in a pretty good deal just 3 days after I tweeted. But, that was an exception and certainly DON’T count on it.
Bottom line is be careful and plan correctly. Mistakes do happen but the more careful we are, the more rare they will be.
* I want to publicly say thank you to anyone who was involved in this and helped me sort things out so quickly.
PK.
