Azure pricing

Penny Pinching in the Cloud: When do Azure Websites make sense? - Scott Hanselman
"Here's the thing about clouds generally and Azure specifically.
If you're not packing things densely you're not going to save money.
You can put up to 500 websites into a single instance using Azure Websites. That's not a typo.
The more you put in the more value you get from your VM/standard instance."

Pricing Overview - How Azure pricing works | Microsoft Azure

Azure Pricing Calculator


Pricing - Virtual Machines (VMs) | Microsoft Azure
Windows Standard
A1 1 1.75 GB 70 GB $0.09/hr  (~$67/mo)

Linux Standard
A1 1 1.75 GB 70 GB $0.06/hr (~$45/mo)

Pricing - Cloud Services | Microsoft Azure
A1 1 1.75 GB 224 GB $0.08/hr (~$60/mo)

Pricing - App Service | Microsoft Azure

S1 Standard 1 1.75 GB 50 GB $0.10/hr (~$74/mo)

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This comparison is mostly apples-to-apples, (almost) same hardware resource, different packaging.
VM: you do the updates, scaling, etc.
Windows = 1.5 Linux price (Windows is not free)
Cloud Service:  a "wrapper" on VM, management included, auto-scaling etc.
App Service: a wrapper on wrapper, simple, just deploy web app; replication (SLA) included with single instance. With Cloud Service or VM you need 2 instances to get SLA.

Microsoft Volume Licensing - Microsoft Open Programs

Choosing the best server OS: Linux vs. Windows comparisons


SQL Database performance & options: Service tiers | Microsoft Azure