I use GCP for my personal projects. Most of them are nodejs applications that I deploy on Cloud Run or GAE standard. Since, these services contain free quota, I am charged between $1-$5 mostly. I want to know if there’s a similar service on GCP or Azure that provides free quota hosting for a database server that supports Microsoft SQL Server databases.
I tried deploying my MSSQL Server database to Microsoft Azure’s SQL Server (Logical Server). I’m new to Azure so I don’t know any service there. This got me a $20 invoice however I only deployed the database, tested it and never used it for the whole month.
It’s quite logical that Microsoft Azure’s SQL Server charges you even if you didn’t use it. This is a service that is always online, you can read more about pricing here
If you just want to try Azure and are ready to do some manual work, you can spin up Virtual Machine and install MS SQL Server on it. Pricing is here
The cheapest you can get is B1s, but it is very very basic and slow. I wouldn’t recommend it for prod.
There is another option for dev. Use docker image and spin app AppService on a free tier. It will cost you nothing, but can be very slow and unreachable from time to time. Plus you need to think about how to save your data through volums etc.
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