Microsoft… All of you won’t feel strange about this company, you may reading this passage on a Windows PC. But we are talking about the cloud services provided by Microsoft (not OneDrive, that’s the consumer-grade stuff, but technically it’s powered by Azure too) Azure, who has eaten up 20% of cloud services’ market share.
Like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, they offer services to average people too. What you need is just a credit card. (If you are a verified student, you can claim 100$ per year for free and without a credit card.) For average people, you will get 200$ free for a month, and then you can either upgrade the account in order to fully use it, or you can use the free services.
Two B1s instances is free to use for 12 months, the bandwidth is the thing you’ll need to pay attention.
After AWS upgrade their free egress bandwidth from 15GB to 100GB, Azure has upgraded their free bandwidth from 20GB(15GB+5GB) to 115GB(15GB+100GB), which makes it much better if you are short on money.
(oh by the way, GCP will upgrade their free egress bandwidth from 1GB to 100GB as well (still excluding China and Australia).
The cheapest instance in Azure is B1ls, which only has 1 cores and 0.5GB RAM. But is it good enough? Let find that out.
Before that, let’s check the price. In Southeast Asia(Singapore), the price is like this.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/linux/#pricing
(B-series should be enough for light usage.)
You see if you buy for a long time, it’s extremely cheap.
I’ve created a B1ls, let’s check it out.
bench.sh for you and your cat.
Network is amazing, due to the great connectivity from Singapore to the whole world.
YABS and Geekbench won’t even run because the RAM is too small. But you can always trust Azure, they are good enough for what you expect for that money.
Bottomline then, is it worth it? The answer is, definitely. You see that’s Microsoft, who can be more reliable than these guys? (well Google and Amazon, but whatever) You can host your blog or your password manager such things on this machine and you can sleep better at night since they are reliable enough that you can trust.