Microsoft Azure Review

Azure

Last updated on

Microsoft Azure was founded as a VPS provider 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

Quick Links


Microsoft Azure VPS Features

Features not included in the VPS price are marked as missing below.

Feature Value Comment
Hourly Billing  Yes
DDOS Protection  No
Backups  No
Control Panel  Custom
SSH Keys Setup  Yes
Total Number of Datacenters  40
Number of Datacenter Continents  5
Monitoring Charts  Yes
Admin REST API  Yes
Upgrade VPS from admin console  No
Mobile Friendly UI  No
Reverse DNS  Yes
Accepted Forms of Payment  Credit cards
Hidden CPU Model  No
Affiliate Program  No
IPv6 support  Yes
Firewall  Yes
Shelving  Yes

You will only be charged for storage for instances that are stopped (need to be turned off through portal or API).

Compare Features

Pros and Cons

Strengths

  • Large choice of cloud services.
  • Numerous datacenter locations across the world.

Weaknesses

  • Very heavy management UI.
  • Resources tied to a an instance are not released automatically when the instance is destroyed.

Microsoft Azure Extra Services

In addition to features included in VPS plans, Microsoft Azure also offers the following services (possibly for a fee):

Backups   Block storage   Object storage   Load balancer  
Floating IP addresses   Team Management   Managed databases   Serverless  
DDoS protection   Kubernetes   GPU instances   Private network  

VPS Instance Provisioning Time

For each Microsoft Azure VPS trial, we measured how long it took to provision the server from the moment it was ordered to the moment it accepted SSH connections.

See also VPS provisioning times for all providers.

Average Provisioning Time Min Provisioning Time Max Provisioning Time Number of VPS Samples
63s 50s 75s 3

Cloud Storage Prices

For a comparison of storage features and prices from all providers, please check the Cloud Storage Prices page.

Storage Type Price / GB / month Description Restriction
Block $0.145 Called "Managed disks".
Throughput increases with disk size: 25MB/second for 32GB disk.

Microsoft Azure block storage
Prices decrease with disk size. LRS (locally redundant). Example price above for 64GB Premium SSD (P6).
Object $0.021 Called "Azure Storage Blobs".
Also available as Cool or Archive storage at lower prices.

Microsoft Azure object storage
First 50TB, Hot, General purpose v2, LRS

Network Bandwidth Prices

These are the network bandwidth prices charged by Microsoft Azure for outbound transfers from VPS to the internet.

For a comparison of bandwidth prices from all providers, go to the Network Bandwitdh Prices page.

Description Price / GB
Pricing model: Allowance Then Charged (the provider gives a free bandwidth allowance with each server. Bandwidth above the free allowance is charged by the provider.)
Free allowance: 100 GB / month (for a 2 core 4GB instance or closest available)
Transfer pool: yes
Prices are from North America, Europe to any destination.
Microsoft Azure networking
Between 0TB and 10TB: $0.088/GB
Between 10TB and 50TB: $0.083/GB
Between 50TB and 150TB: $0.070/GB
Above 150TB: $0.050/GB

Microsoft Azure Instance Types and Plans

How fast are Microsoft Azure servers?
Screen all Microsoft Azure VPS Plans

All Microsoft Azure instance types

Note: All VPS prices reported at VPSBenchmarks are for one month without any further commitment and before promotions unless noted otherwise. The IPv4 charge is added to the VPS monthly price in case the provider doesn't include it by default.

Plan Number of CPU cores RAM Storage Price
Family:
General purpose compute
Instance Type:
Dds v5

The Ddsv5 series virtual machines are based on the 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8370C (Ice Lake) processor in a hyper-threaded configuration. The Ddv5 and Ddsv5 virtual machine sizes feature high performance, large local SSD storage (up to 3,600 GiB) and provide a better value proposition for most general-purpose workloads compared to the prior generation (e.g., increased scalability and an upgraded CPU class).

D2s v5 2 8.0GB 30GB $70.08 / month
Family:
General purpose compute
Instance Type:
Das v5

The Das v5-series virtual machines are based on the 3rd Generation AMD EPYCTM 7763v (Milan) processor. This processor's frequency can achieve up to 3.5GHz. The Das v5 VM sizes offer a combination of vCPUs and memory able to meet the requirements associated with most production workloads.
The Das v5 virtual machine sizes do not have any temporary storage thus lowering the price of entry.

D2as v5 2 8.0GB 30GB $62.78 / month
Family:
General purpose compute
Instance Type:
Da v4

The Dav4 and Dasv4 Azure VM-series provide up to 96 vCPUs, 384 GiBs of RAM and 2,400 GiBs of SSD-based temporary storage and feature the AMD EPYC™ 7452 processor.
The "s" variants support "Premium SSD disk storage" and have smaller temporary storage.

D2a v4 2 8.0GB 50GB $69.12 / month
D2as v4 2 8.0GB 16GB $70.08 / month
Family:
Memory optimized
Instance Type:
Eads v5

The Eads v5-series virtual machines are based on the 3rd Generation AMD EPYCTM 7763v (Milan) processor. This processor has base frequency of 2.55Ghz and can achieve up to 3.7 GHz. The Eads v5 VM sizes feature up to 672 GiB of RAM, high performance, and large local SSD storage (up to 3,600 GiB.) These virtual machines are ideal for memory-intensive enterprise applications, relational database servers, and in-memory analytics workloads.

VPSBenchmarks has not tested any plan for this instance type yet.
Family:
General purpose compute
Instance Type:
Dd v4

The Ddv4 series virtual machines are based on the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8272CL processor. This custom processor runs at a base speed of 2.5Ghz and can achieve up to 3.4Ghz all core turbo frequency. The Ddv4/Ddsv4 virtual machine sizes feature fast, large local SSD storage (up to 2,400 GiB) and are well suited for applications that benefit from low latency, high-speed local storage.

D2ds v4 2 8.0GB 75GB $81.36 / month
Family:
Compute optimized
Instance Type:
Fs v2

The Fsv2-series virtual machines provide 2-GiB of RAM and 8 GB of local temporary storage (SSD) per vCPU(s) and are optimized for compute intensive workloads. The Fsv2-series VMs are hyper-threaded and based on the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8272CL (second generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors), or the Intel Xeon® Platinum 8168 (Skylake) processor.
The Fsv2 VMs can be attached to Premium SSD or Ultra Disk persistent storage.

F2s v2 2 4.0GB 16GB $61.00 / month
Family:
General purpose compute
Instance Type:
Bs

Bs-series are economical virtual machines that provide a low-cost option for workloads that typically run at a low to moderate baseline CPU performance, but sometimes need to burst to significantly higher CPU performance when the demand rises. These workloads don’t require the use of the full CPU all the time, but occasionally will need to burst to finish some tasks more quickly. Many applications such as development and test servers, low traffic web servers, small databases, micro services, servers for proof-of-concepts, build servers, and code repositories fit into this model.
Very small temporary storage is included.

B1MS 1 2.0GB 4GB $15.11 / month
B2s 2 4.0GB 8GB $30.37 / month
B2MS 2 8.0GB 16GB $60.73 / month
Family:
General purpose compute
Instance Type:
Dads v5

The Dads v5-series virtual machines are based on the 3rd Generation AMD EPYCTM 7763v (Milan) processor. This processor's frequency can achieve up to 3.5GHz. The Dads v5 virtual machine sizes feature high performance, large local SSD storage (up to 3,600 GiB) and provide a better value proposition for most general-purpose workloads compared to the prior Das v4 VM generation (e.g., more local SSD capacity and faster local disk IOPS).

VPSBenchmarks has not tested any plan for this instance type yet.
Family:
General purpose compute
Instance Type:
Dplds v5

The Dplsv5-series and Dpldsv5-series virtual machines are based on the Arm architecture, delivering outstanding price-performance for general-purpose workloads. These virtual machines feature the Ampere® Altra® Arm-based processor operating at 3.0 GHz, which provides an entire physical core for each virtual machine vCPU. These virtual machines offer a range of vCPU sizes, up to 2 GiB of memory per vCPU, and temporary storage options able to meet the requirements of most non-memory-intensive and scale-out workloads such as microservices, small databases, caches, gaming servers, and more.

D2plds v5 2 4.0GB 75GB $56.06 / month
Instance Type:
Other

No description

B2als v2 2 4.0GB 28GB $27.44 / month
A1 v2 1 2.0GB 10GB $31.39 / month
F1 1 2.0GB 16GB $36.00 / month
F1s 1 2.0GB 16GB $36.50 / month
D2 v3 2 8.0GB 50GB $69.12 / month
D2ads_v5 (Off rankings) 2 8.0GB 75GB $75.19 / month
D4ads_v5 (Off rankings) 4 16.0GB 150GB $150.38 / month
D8ads_v5 (Off rankings) 8 32.0GB 300GB $300.76 / month

Be the first to learn about new Best VPS rankings. Subscribe to our newsletter.