What's the Minimum Hosting Cost for Windows Azure?

Jul 14, 2009 • Microsoft

Update: Azure pricing and functionality has changes alot since this post was written making the details below out of date.

Microsoft has announced the initial pricing for Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET Services. My question is still “What is the Minimum it will cost to host a small website/application on Azure?”

If your application is racking up “Compute” time when ever it is “live”, then that equals a total of approximately 720 hours of “compute” time for a total of $86.40 per month.

If you store less than 1GB of files, that’s $0.15 per month.

Then if you also use a database with SQL Azure, that’s an additional $9.99 per month for up to a 1GB relational database.

Now if the website uses 10GB of bandwidth (that’s how much my blog used last month), then that’s about $1.50 per month.

If you add all these up, that’s a Total of $98.04! And that looks like the very minimum cost of hosting an average “small” app/website on Azure. That surely doesn’t make me want to switch my DiscountASP.NET and GoDaddy.com hosting accounts over to Windows Azure.

I can’t believe Microsoft isn’t making it cheaper to host a small website on Azure, by making the “Compute” time so expensive. Unless of course I’m misunderstanding how “Compute” time is calculated. Does anyone know if I am correct in assuming that 1 full day of hosting your application will rack up 24 hours of total “Compute” time? I hope I’m wrong on this.

Below is a summary of the pricing:

Windows Azure: