Azure: pretty expensive for web hosting

I can almost hear the response now: No! Really? Anyhow …

I thought I’d take a look at prices for hosting a small website on random vanilla web hosts, and for the same on Azure and Amazon.

Random web hosts appear to sit around £2.49 a month for a small website, at least to start with.

An Azure Extra Small instance costs $0.05 per deployed hour – or a whopping $36 a month. You get an order of magnitude more storage at 20GB, but still .. I’m unlikely to need it.

Interestingly I could also dump the whole site into Azure storage. At $0.15 per GB per hour, with transaction fees. I don’t know for sure, but am pretty sure it’s not pro-rata-d for usage less than a GB.

For comparison an Amazon Micro instance costs $0.03 an hour, or about $22 a month.

Or, I guess I could host something at home from a dynamic IP, which probably fits somewhere in the middle in terms of cost.

At any rate, at 10 times the cost Azure doesn’t look like a rational option.