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Pricing Tiers updates for Microsoft Azure Websites

With the new release of Microsoft Azure Websites we are introducing some changes to pricing tiers, as well as a more flexible mechanism to scale your websites through the use of Web Hosting Plans.…

With the new release of Microsoft Azure Websites we are introducing some changes to pricing tiers, as well as a more flexible mechanism to scale your websites through the use of Web Hosting Plans.

The primary change to our pricing tiers is the introduction of the new Basic tier, which is designated for production sites, supporting smaller sites, as well as development and testing scenarios. The Basic pricing tier offers up to three instances of dedicated Virtual Machine running your web sites, SSL support, Scheduled Jobs, Endpoint Monitoring and more.

We are also making some changes to the Standard tier, making it more cost-efficient. First, Standard

will now offer 50 GB of storage (X5 than before!), 5 free SNI SSL support and one dedicated IP, as well as unlimited Web Sockets connections. The following table provides a summary of the features and resources included in each tier:

Free

Shared

Basic

Standard

Infrastructure

60 minutes of CPU capacity per day on shared infrastructure.

Share 240 minutes and CPU capacity per day on shared infrastructure

Small/Medium/Large VM Instances

Small/Medium/Large VM Instance

Maximum scale

1 instance

6 shared instances

3 instances

10 instances

Auto Scale

Not Available

Not Available

Not Available

Available

Storage

1GB

1GB

10GB

50GB

Bandwidth

Ingress – Unlimited

Ingress – Unlimited

Ingress – Unlimited

Ingress – Unlimited

Egress – Up to 165MB per day

Egress – Standard rates above 165MB per day

Egress – Standard rates above 5GB per month

Egress – Standard rates above 5GB per month

Debugger support

Available

(1 concurrent connection, per app)

Available

(1 concurrent connection, per app)

Available

(1 concurrent connection, per app)

Available

(up to 5 concurrent connections per app)

Web Sockets

Up to 5 concurrent connections

Up to 35 concurrent connections

Up to 350 concurrent connections

Unlimited connections

Custom domains

Not Available

Available

Available

Available

SSL

Not Available

Not Available

Available at Standard Rates

5 SNI. 1 IP included

(More at standard rates)

SLA

Not Available

Not Available

99.9% Monthly

99.9% Monthly

Always-on

Not Available

Not Available

Available

Available

Backup Restore

Not Available

Not Available

Not Available

Available

Site Slots (Environments)

Not Available

Not Available

Not Available

Available

Web Jobs

Available

Available

Available

Available

Endpoint Monitoring

Not Available

Not Available

Available

Available

Support for Azure Traffic Manager

Not Available

Not Available

Not Available

Available

64 Bit Support

Not Available

Not Available

Available

Available

In addition, we have also introduced a new way of managing your resources using Web Hosting Plans, part of which is the concept of a Pricing Tier (analogous to what you probably know as Web Site Mode). A Pricing Tier is an attribute of your Web Hosting Plan, and as such, determines the resources and features available to the sites contained in a the Plan. This is how it looks in the existing Azure portal and the Azure Portal Preview:

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We believe that with the introduction of Web Hosting Plans the Pricing Tiers customer with will have a smoother scale/cost ramp as well as a Price Point/Feature Offering that is very competitive against other hosting options. For more information about Web Hosting Plans, visit this blog post and this article.