I'm currently hosting my websites on Windows 2008 Servers through an old-school hosting company.
I'd like to switch to something like Windows Azure in hope that it'll be a better service.
Is it as easy as copying my .NET websites and databases across or will they not work and might have to be re-coded? I have websites, database and REST services (REST talking with mobile apps).
Would Amazon Cloud be an easier switch?
Quite a few people have asked similar questions in the past - check out questions/answers like:
For a typical ASP.Net SQL Server application, you probably won't have to change too much - but there are always possible problems/challenges in things like Session management and local file storage.
If you do rely on a lot of local machine customisation - e.g. if you absolutely need access to a persistent disk drive, then one alternative to consider is to use an X-Drive - see, for example, how Umbraco and DNN have been ported - http://azureaccelerators.codeplex.com/, http://dnnazureaccelerator.codeplex.com/ and http://waacceleratorumbraco.codeplex.com/. However, in general, I'd advise not to take this route unless your codebase is large and has to - taking this route will impact your architecture and your scalability and durability.
