WIshing to know if migrating an old vb.net (version 4.8) website to Azure is possible.

Question

We have a clients website that seems to be running on .net framework version 4.8. It seems for this version it needs to be hosted on a windows server. The files are about 522 Mb and there is an associated MS SQL database with 3 or 4 tables, the largest which has about 932000 rows approximately and the other tables are a lot less. The tables themselves represent horse racing data of horses, studs and stallions. The horses table seems to be the master table. It appears as though all data editing is via the admin login only. There are other pages which seem to be focus solely on the presentation of the data. I looked at transferring this to a Ubuntu server but this seemed to be a no go and another forum claimed that version 4.8 or earlier this was not possible.

Is there a particular plan for this? How hard would it be to transfer the site assuming there is nothing too special about it? (There doesn't appear to be). What sort of price would we be looking at, either pay as you go or reserved pricing if there is a substantial difference between them?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi @Glenn Reed,

WIshing to know if migrating an old vb.net (version 4.8) website to Azure is possible.

If you just want to migrate it to Azure App Service, it is possible. Please refer to this document: Migrate your .NET web app or service to Azure App Service.

In addition, the document mentions that most ASP.NET websites (Webforms, MVC) and services (Web API, WCF) can move directly to Azure App Service with no changes. You should be able to achieve this requirement easily by referring to the relevant documentation steps.

Best regards,

Xudong Peng

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Answer 2

your source is correct. a .net 4.8 application only run on windows. also as your website is vb.net it must also be webforms. while asp.net core runs on linux, there is no support for webforms, so an upgrade is basically a rewrite.

azure supports asp.net 4.8 applications. the main issue in porting is authentication if your current site uses windows authentication, you will need to pick another form see azure builtin:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/overview-authentication-authorization

the pricing will depend on the scaling you need and how much activity your site provides. use the azure app service pricing calculator. add app service and azure SQL Database.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/

for app service be sure to pick windows.

for sql database you probably want Serverless, so pick DTU under purchase model. pick shared if cost is more important than max performance.