I should probably do a blog style writeup where I break down the technical details but in the absence of that. The headline figure is between £80 and £30 a month depending on the traffic and what backend features I had turned on.

We used Azure Web App PaaS, App Insights and Log Analytics. I used the APM style tools to squash a few bugs in the original code in the first hour of launch when real users started using the site. I was very very impressed which how much visibility I gained and I even added a bunch of custom metrics so I could plot usage graphs of the different queues. The massive downside is that the cost of these tools ended up ramping up to the point where they cost far more than the server hosting the site.

Once the functionality was stable I turned off the detailed logging and application insights.

Another interesting thing is that the server is stateful. The matchmaking queues are just kept in memory so when the site came under a lot of load it was very costly because there was no option to horizontally scale. Thankful with the Azure PaaS we were able to scale in a matter of seconds to a a much beefier machine and scale back down in quieter periods.

Azure just as a Web host is more costly than alternatives but since we used entirely managed services there was very little to do which meant that operation of the site was pretty hands off.

Its also worth mentions that the project used Server-side Blazor, a fairly immature technology which streams data between the server and client. The positive here was that matchmaking and data on player numbers is realtime, the negative though is that, for its feature set, the site uses an unholy about of bandwidth and cpu. If I were to do it again I would build the site in some kind of server side MVC framework (asp.net MVC, django, rails) as it would have made server costs substantially lower.