In the past month, we have run performance trials on EC2, GCE and Azure small virtual machine plans:
They are not the cheapest options available at either one of those providers but they still qualify as inexpensive. They all have only 1 CPU core and less than 2GB memory. It's more than enough to run a website with several hundred thousands hits per day. All 3 plans offer Ubuntu Linux.
As opposed to the "all-included" plans made popular by DigitalOcean and Linode, the 3 providers being tested here will charge for compute time, storage and bandwitdh separately. That being said the compute time charge is by far the largest component of the bill.
EC2 t2.micro: 1 core, 1GB
CPU usage is measured in credits and pushing it to 100% for more than 1 hour will get your VM severely throttled until the cpu credits are replenished. EC2 makes CPU credit graphs available that clearly show where you stand at any time.
GCE g1-small: 1 core, 1.7GB with SSD storage.
The VM is allowed CPU usage spikes but it can't be maxed out for too long either. The cpu usage rules are not as transparent as in EC2.
Azure A1-small: 1 core, 1.75GB
Azure doesn't advertise any limit of the CPU usage of these machines.
All 3 admin consoles are considerably more complex than those of smaller providers. They offer a lot of services other than virtual machines and there are many options for each VM (storage, network interfaces).
EC2 and GCE UI are very similar. Azure UI is quite refreshing compared to the very austere black and white EC2 and GCE ones. It can be disorienting at first as the screen expands in both directions when you click on the various panes. Azure takes first place for originality, GCE is last as it's the most complex of all 3.
Compare EC2, GCE and Azure with those charts.
EC2 had the fastest response times of all plans tested at vpsbenchmarks.com. The GCE response times were very close but Azure was far behind. You actually have to wait 4 times longer on average for an Azure response compared to EC2 (138ms vs 35ms).
What makes Azure A1 so slow? Simple, its antiquated hardware: the Azure plan sports a 5 year old CPU (AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 4171 HE) and in 2015, it still is not using SSDs. Both EC2 and GCE feature recent Intel Xeon by default.
A plan with SSD on Azure will set you back at least $70 per month.
Once again, EC2 comes out first as it will only set you back $15 per month for a t2.micro instance including storage and bandwidth. Azure is more than twice more expensive despite of the its poor showing in performance tests.
Note that all 3 plans offer rebates of various kinds: they all offer free credits for new clients. In addition GCE reduces its prices for sustained usage (when you use a VM for a full month).
They all also bill usage by the hour or the minute. This is a big advantage compared to the smallest providers who insist to charge their users for a full month even if the VM was used only for a day.
EC2 allows sending emails from the VM. The other 2 don't.
To summarize, EC t2.micro is the winner with lowest response times and lowest price, it's a no brainer for hosting a small web application. Avoid Azure, it's slow and expensive. GCE featured really well and is a good choice.
The results might be very different for CPU intensive applications, EC2 t2.micro and GCE g1-small are not designed for that kind of usage, so do your own research before committing to a provider.