After testing Microsoft Azure Small (A1), Large (A3), Extra Large (A4) and A7, this is how the results are.

(More CMIPS means more perfomance so a most powerful instance).

As you can see Azure Extra Large and Azure A7 have the same CMIPS performance, the main difference is in the number of RAM.

About Linux prices we can say that Azure are not the cheapest, but they try to be much cheaper than Amazon. They have a long path to provide so many and so quality products as Amazon, but they are working intensely.

As we are commited to Start ups and Open Source we didn’t compare prices for Windows Servers between Amazon and Microsoft Azure.

In the next graphic you can see the CMIPS (CPU power + memory speed), blue bar -longer bar means more power-, and the CUP (Cost of Unit of Process) multiplied to 10M to fit the graphic scale, orange bar -shorter bar means cheap price, longer bar means expensive price per CMIP.

The best power-price are up on the list (long blue bar) but have a small orange bar.

Linode has an amazing relationg between power and price, the physical dedicated server from OVH introduced to have a wider picture has also a very good CUP ratio and with high computing power Digital Ocean (they equip SSD disks) beats the game with very powerful instances yet not so expensive as Amazon.