Editor’s Note: This post was written by Byron Tardif, Program Manager on the Windows Azure Web Sites Team
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:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
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, andas such, determines the resources and features available to the sites contained in a thePlan. This is how it looks in the existing Azure portal and the Azure Portal Preview:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
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, visitthis blog post and this article.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
