Blazor Hosting Cost Analyst


 

I have spent some time looking at if Server-Side Blazor App is better than the Client-Side Blazor App, Blazor Hosting Models post.  I decided to look at it from a cost position and see if there is any benefit of one way over the other.  

I took a simple Blazor Application that I wrote Inspirational Quotes and create both a server-side application and a client-side application.  I then deployed each.  For the server-side application, I deployed as an Azure app service, free trier.  For the cient-side application, I deployed that with Azure blob storage statice web site.  The goal was to just focus on the cost of each deployment.

After the deployment I had several users access each web site several times a day.  This was to simulate a light usage, such as a sample app from a blog or portfolio would get.  I monitored the sites for 30 days.


Actual Cost

I was a little surprised to see the cost for each deployment and utilization for 30 days was $0.00!

Other Interesting Findings

Even though there was no winner in the cost aspect of the test, I was able to learn a couple of other tidbits of comparison information.


1. Custom Domain Names

  Advantage: Client-Side 

I wanted to add a custom domain name to each web site.  For the client-side, it is very straight forward to add the custom domain.   And there is no additional cost.

On the server-side, in order to add a custom domain, you have to upgrade to the next service tier.  This increased the cost to $9.99 per month.


2. Ease of deployment

Advantage: Server-side

Deploying to Azure app service is quick and easy, whether you are doing it via Visual Studio, Azure DevOps, or Github.

On the client-side, We deployed by publishing to a file folder and updating the Azure blob storage.  You can set up a Github for the publish folders and then automatically deploy on check-in.  This is still an additional overhead than using an app service.


Best Of both 

The most reveling find was that I can combine both the free Client-Side for the front end and deploy my API based backend to an Azure App Service on the free tier since the APIs do not need a custom domain.  





Doing this exercise helped me be better prepared going forward to solve problems using Blazor in a cost-effective manner.

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