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:
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.