It’s was time for me to start thinking about a place where I could host my NodeJS and .NET Apps. I know there is Heroku for Node and others but I needed a virtual machine (Oracle DB, ODBC, C++ compiled Node packages).

First thought: Let’s see what Azure has to offer.

Second thought: Oh! Azure is not so cheap 🙂

Third thought: Maybe I’ll see OVH price list.

Fourth thought: I’ll go with the OVH VMs.

Few hours later… comes a mail from Microsoft:

Wait a minute…. What is Visual Studio Dev Essentials? Why haven’t I heard about it? Long story short it is a service for developers with free tools, cloud services, and trainings.

Dev Essentials membership main benefits (from MS mail) :

Visual Studio Tools and Services

$25/month of Azure credits for 1 year

credits for 1 year Xamarin University Training

6-month* subscription to Pluralsight

SQL Server 2014 Developer Edition

I know it could be better but 25$ is enough for a basic Virtual Machine with windows on Azure and 6 month of Pluralsight is great. If you haven’t heard about it, go and check it out.