Microsoft Azure vs Amazon Lightsail

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We have tested 10 VPS plans from Microsoft Azure and Amazon Lightsail. We'll show which one is best based on a detailed performance analysis, on features and prices.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure was founded in 2008.
It is headquartered in the USA.
It offers VPS, Database, Storage and Networking hosting products.

It has datacenters in:

• Australia
• Brazil
• Canada
• China
• France
• Germany
• India
• Norway
• Singapore
• Singapore
• South Africa
• South Korea
• Switzerland
• United Arab Emirates
• United Kingdom
• United States

Amazon Lightsail

Amazon Lightsail was founded in 2016.
It is headquartered in the USA.
It offers VPS hosting products.

It has datacenters in:

• Australia
• Canada
• France
• Germany
• India
• Ireland
• Japan
• Singapore
• South Korea
• United Kingdom
• United States

VPS Plans

	Plan Name	Monthly Price	CPU cores	Memory (GB)	Disk Space (GB)	Data Transfer (GB)	Latest trial
	1GB 1core	$5.00	1	1.0	40	2000	Dec 28 2022
	2GB 1core	$10.00	1	2.0	60	3000	Mar 30 2022
	4GB 2cores	$20.00	2	4.0	80	4000	Aug 14 2022
	B2als v2	$27.44	2	4.0	28	0	Sep 06 2023
	D2plds v5	$56.06	2	4.0	75	0	Mar 04 2023
	D2as v5	$62.78	2	8.0	30	0	Apr 15 2022
	D2s v5	$70.08	2	8.0	30	0	Oct 05 2022
	D2ads_v5 (Off rankings)	$75.19	2	8.0	75	0	Aug 23 2022
	D4ads_v5 (Off rankings)	$150.38	4	16.0	150	0	Aug 23 2022
	D8ads_v5 (Off rankings)	$300.76	8	32.0	300	0	Aug 25 2022

Compare specs for all plans from all providers

Note: "Off rankings" plans are not included in the Screener and are not considered for Best VPS rankings. They may either be previews where the VPS have been directly provisioned by the provider, they may be too old or they may exceed the maximum number of plans that can be listed for each provider.

Performance Grades

To summarize the performance of each VPS plan, we generated grades based on the various tests that were run: web, sysbench, endurance and remote timing tests. Each grade focuses on one aspect of the VPS speed or stability (cpu, disk IO, network IO...) and is made of one or more metrics measured during the tests.

Grades are evenly distributed between A and F. A is best, F is worst.

Follow the letter links to find the test results backing the grade.

How are grades calculated?

	Plan Name	Web Perf	Raw CPU Power	Perf Stability	Disk IO Perf	Network Perf
	1GB 1core $5.00	D	F	E	F	E
	2GB 1core $10.00	E	F	E	F	D
	4GB 2cores $20.00	E	E	E	F	D
	B2als v2 $27.44	B	D	E	F	C
	D2plds v5 $56.06	E	D	B	F	C
	D2as v5 $62.78	B	C	D	E	C
	D2s v5 $70.08	B	D	E	F	C
	D2ads_v5 (Off rankings) $75.19	B	D	D	F	C
	D4ads_v5 (Off rankings) $150.38	B	B	C	E	C
	D8ads_v5 (Off rankings) $300.76	A	A	B	B	C

Features and Datacenters

This list is a subset of the features each provider may offer.

CPUs

These are the CPUs we have seen in Microsoft Azure and Amazon Lightsail instances in the past 18 months.

Performance Consistency

The provider consistency score shows how much variation can be expected between 2 servers of the same type at the same provider. A high consistency score (>65) means the performance of all servers of the provider is consistent over many trials and many plans.

Providers who don't have enough data yet at VPSBenchmarks don't have a consistency score.

Screenshots

All Amazon Lightsail screenshots

VPS Instance Provisioning Time

This is the average time it took to create an instance for Microsoft Azure and Amazon Lightsail from instance order to instance accepting connections.

All VPS provisioning times

Performance in Depth...

These are some of the test results that are used to determine the grades above.

Web Response Times

We ran a database intensive web application at various levels of load on cloud servers from Microsoft Azure and Amazon Lightsail. This is the average response time measured locally on the VPS for each plan we tested.

Maximum HTTP Load

We ran a database intensive web application at various levels of load on cloud servers from Microsoft Azure and Amazon Lightsail. This is the maximum rate of HTTP requests that each server handled without timing out.

Sysbench CPU Performance

We ran the full suite of Sysbench tests on VPS plans of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Lightsail. These are the Sysbench CPU test results:

Sysbench Disk IO Performance

We ran the full suite of Sysbench tests on VPS plans of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Lightsail. These are the Sysbench Disk IO Random Read test results:

Network Transfers

We have performed large file transfers from the Microsoft Azure and Amazon Lightsail VPS and we measured the speed of downloads and uploads.

The transfers involve multiple files, 10 threads and last for at least 10 seconds at maximum speed. The transfers are repeated 3 times from different servers and only the fastest transfer is reported here.

Sustained CPU Endurance Tests

We pushed the CPU of those VPS plans hard for 24 hours straight.

This test shows how fast the VPS can go for long periods of time, how stable the performance is and it also gives clues on how overallocated the VPSs may be.

Throughput variations of the endurance test over 24 hours. The coefficient of variation is the standard deviation of the test throughput divided by its average value. Low variations mean that resources allocated to the server were stable for the duration of the test and there was little contention.

Compare Microsoft Azure and Amazon Lightsail against other providers