Microsoft Azure compared to "regular" webhosting

i have an idea of putting my blog on to Azure instead of a regular webhosting company. The only thing i cannot figure out is if that will be cheaper or not. The good part is the getting-knowledge of Azure but on the other hand it i开发者_开发技巧s my personal blog and i really don't wanna spend to much money on it.

So do you have any idea of how the pricing works? I saw some calculator but didn't manage to understand the numbers.

Thanks in advance

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You'd have to have a significantly-active blog to justify the costs of Azure. Aside from keeping a web role up and running (and just one instance chews up almost $90 monthly, as ZippyV stated), you'll also have to pay for data.

You do NOT need to invest in SQL Azure though. There's Azure table storage which is much better suited for your blog. It has a table structure, you can define entities (e.g. classes, maybe a BlogEntryClass) that are stored, and the storage costs will run you significantly less than SQL Azure (only $0.15 per GB per month, so your storage costs will likely remain well under a dollar a month for a blog, a small fraction of the cost of SQL Azure).

You'll also pay for bandwidth ($0.15 outbound per GB).

If this is a learning exercise, it's a great investment, but if you have an MSDN Premium account, you can host your blog there - you get 750 compute-hours monthly (enough to run a single role instance 24x7), 10GB table storage, and 14GB monthly outbound data.

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Classic webhosting will be a lot cheaper for you. In Azure you need to pay for at least 1 instance (webserver) to run per hour. At then end of the month you will have to pay about 89$ if I remember correctly and that's without SQL Server.

If you want to learn more on how to develop for Azure you can download the SDK and run your project locally. You don't need to pay for it.

EDIT: you can find the pricing here. If you want to add SQL server you pay a minimum of 100$ a month.