Some of the feedback I had from my session at SQL Saturday in Edinburgh was on the Service Plan’s* available in Azure for Web hosting. The different levels from Free to Standard have vastly differing underlying capabilities and costs.
The most relevant of these though is that Basic and Standard Service Plan’s can run multiple websites for the same cost. Each shared website is charged per website whereas each Basic and Standard is charged per VM which can host multiple websites.
What this means for us, the end user, is that we can host around eight websites in shared for the same cost as eight websites in a standard plan. When we publish our ninth website we are better switching to the the standard plan. The standard plan also offers many other features such as automatic scaling and the extremely useful deployment slots.
More information can be obtained from the following links:
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/app-service/
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/app-service/plans/
* currently labelled as App Service plan pricing tier