What are all the differences between Microsofts Window's azure and web hosting companies like GoDaddy, hostgator ?
Solution
Here are a few key differences to consider:
Server usage. With a hoster like GoDaddy, servers are shared resources, and there's no way to figure out (or limit) the number of tenants sharing a given server with your app. With Azure, a given server, with its 8 cores, is allocated to specific VMs. At most, 8 virtual machines will be deployed to a given server.
SLA. With a shared-hoster like GoDaddy, there's no built-in way to scale your app, or to ensure availability with multiple servers running your app. With Azure, you can easily scale to 2 or more instances, ensuring at least 99.95% availability.
Virtual servers. As a clarification to the point above: GoDaddy now offers virtual servers, with cost starting at roughly $30 per month. However, this offering does not provide any scaling support.
Durable storage. Aside from SQL Azure (GoDaddy provides SQL Server hosting), Azure provides tables, blobs and queues, each triple-replicated. Further, Azure can deploy a new SQL Azure instance in a few seconds. SQL Azure is also triple-replicated.
Monitoring and diagnostics infrastructure. Azure provides a diagnostics infrastructure to capture things like performance counters, queue sizes, custom log files, etc. and consolidate them into easily accessible/queryable table and blob storage. You can then build app-monitoring apps around this set of diagnostics. Also, the Azure fabric itself monitors your application's health. In the event of a failed server, for instance, your app is restarted on another server automatically. I'm unaware of any automated health monitoring and recovery system built into cheap/shared hosting solutions such as those offered by GoDaddy.
Additional services on-demand. In Azure, you have access to several consumable services, such as SQL Azure, service bus, scalable storage (blobs, tables, queues), access control, caching (going live in 2011), and Reporting Services (going live in 2011).