Did you know that the average month in Azure is 732 hours long? And that when you ask an Azure pricing tool for a monthly cost, it takes the hourly cost and multiplies it by 732 … and that used to be 744!
Since I started working with Microsoft Azure, I’ve been using 744 hours as the average month in the Azure universe. That was because that’s what Microsoft used.
Only this week my colleague saw that Microsoft had switched to using 732 hours. I was puzzled so we checked, confirmed, and opened Excel to do some maths.
Let’s analyse 744 hours first:
744 (hours per month) * 12 months = 8928 hours per year.
8928 hours per year / 365 days = 24.46 hours.
Hmm. Let’s allow for a leap year:
8928 hours per year / 366 days = 24.39 hours.
OK. Let’s forget 744 hours and go with 732.
732 (hours per month) * 12 months = 8784 hours per year.
8784 hours per year / 365 days = 24.066 hours.
Not quite even. Let’s go with a leap year:
8784 hours per year / 365 days = 24 hours exactly.
Sooo ….
732 hours is the average length of a month in a leap year.
Azure’s monthly pricing is based on the average month in a leap year.
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Like your last calculation 🙂 Where did Microsoft reveal this kind of information? Does this mean Azure services now are cheaper?
That information is all over the Azure pricing pages. No, this doesn’t reduce the cost of Azure. They list the per hour price, and estimate per month costs. For things like VMs, we are actually charged pro-rata on a per-second running (technically speaking, allocated) basis.
Thank you so much for clearing that up, I though I was going mad and thought maybe I had forgotten how many hours they offered the previous week on the pricing calculator
Hi,
I have a general question regarding Azure Prizing. I’m thinking about a private project to improve my coding skills. I would publish it to Azure because It might open some webpages about 20 times a month.
Azure Calculator estimates around $26.78 / month ( 1VM @ 31 days ).
Question:
* I assume the only way to reduce the cost is to start and stop the VM every time I want to access the website?
* Is there a ASP Hosting Provider more suitable for my “Low Bandwidth, less Usage” Usecase?
You pay for a VM while it is running, not how much you use it. It is guaranteed processor and RAM, and someone’s got to pay for that. You could power up & down on demand ( https://www.petri.com/starting-azure-runbook-phone ) or you could use Azure App Services to host the site instead.