> building out a reasonably large Web API for a game.
How are you hosting this? Can you share any experience? I built a Web API using .Net 4.6.1 and when it came time to host it, Azure DB, Azure Web App became quickly super expensive.
I'd be curious to know if you've find a cost-effective hosting solution for hosting .Net Core APIs in a Production-like environment for a SaaS website (which is what I'm building on the side)
I'm not OP but maybe I can chime in. My employer runs a fairly large application platform on Azure and I've used Azure for personal projects a few times.
Let me start off that you can host (ASP).NET Core projects just about anywhere, so using AWS is definitely a possibility. I myself use basic Azure functionality though. Here's what I do when costs are the limiting factor:
For storage, Azure used to provide a small (20MB) db instance for free in their 'free tier', but that doesn't seem to be available anymore.
As an alternative you should consider using Azure Table Storage instead of Azure DB.
While Azure DB offers a fully-functional SQL server instance, it will cost at least $5 per month to use on a basic plan. Using Table Storage (Azure's 'NoSQL' solution), on the other hand, is way cheaper. For a fairly small application with less than a hundred users my average monthly bill is $0.00. Even if it scales to a hundred thousands users (while it isn't really built for that) the costs for using Table Storage would probably still be less than a dollar per month.
Alternatively, you could use SQL Server Compact. This should be possible on Azure but I would not recommend going this route though.
As for hosting, my personal apps almost exclusively make use of the Free tier for App Services. For what my apps are doing this turns out to be efficient enough. If that's not enough, a simple Shared hosting environment is also pretty cheap at less than $10 per month.
It only gets expensive if you really need dedicated VMs running for you but even then $50 per month for a dedicated machine shouldn't break the bank if your SaaS business is actually going somewhere, plus scaling it up or out is dead simple. On average I spend more time per month babysitting the single VM I have with RackSpace where I run old (non-azure) webapps than our entire team spends managing our azure environments (DTAP) with hundreds of apps and databases.
How are you hosting this? Can you share any experience? I built a Web API using .Net 4.6.1 and when it came time to host it, Azure DB, Azure Web App became quickly super expensive.
I'd be curious to know if you've find a cost-effective hosting solution for hosting .Net Core APIs in a Production-like environment for a SaaS website (which is what I'm building on the side)