Pricing Tiers updates for Microsoft Azure Websites

Posted on April 4, 2014

Byron Tardif Senior Program Manager, Azure App Service

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
Bandwidth	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: clip_image002

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.

Announcements Web Hosting Plan Pricing Sites Tiers Web