Unclear pricing of Windows Azure [closed]

I work on the Windows Azure team. I do think this is confusing (and please do contact support... with an honest mistake like this, I suspect they'll refund your money). We did add a warning in the portal, so you should have seen something telling you that stopped instances are still billed.

I'd like to see the "stopped" state go away altogether. What "stopped" means is that the VM is allocated and still has all your bits on it (including log files, etc.), but the code is not running (and the load balancer is not routing traffic). That's occasionally useful (like when you want to shut down a website due to some error but still be able to connect to the VM and check out the logs, or when you want to be able to restart the app quickly), but I don't think it's useful enough to justify the confusion about what "stopped" means.

Sorry about the confusion.

While I don't think this belongs on SO, it appears very clear to me with this line developers will want to **remove** the compute instances that are not being used to minimize compute hour billing

No where in there does it say stopping/starting. Also deployed does not mean running. You can deploy software and not run it.

I also want to add that the reason they may want to dedicate CPU's to your deployed application is to provide more predictability in your processing. Imagine if it did NOT take a CPU for your deployment but rather clustered a 'lot' of cpu's across many deployments. Your deployment is idle, then a sudden influx of computations occur. This will require the CPU's to take away processing power from other deployments to satisfy your computations.

Imagine buying a dedicate server to host a website, but you don't have the domain name setup nor do you have any files on the server. You are still going to pay for that server even if someone cannot access it.

If you were just testing Azure and doing integration tests, they SHOULD have a feature that says, "Deploy my application for 24 hours then delete it". That way you never have to worry about leaving something deployed on accident.

As others have said, definitely politely contact Azure billing. I had a very positive experience with a similar query - with a different "hello world" issue - they were happy to refund me once.

The Azure portal does now warn you that instances will be billed as long as they are allocated - but it's possible to miss this no matter how big they make that warning.

You really need to call them to sort out your billing problem. Since this wasn't clear to you, it's probably not clear to others as well.

Call the billing department and talk to them. I imagine they're likely to refund the first month in these cases.

Failing that, dispute the charge with your credit card company.