At least for small VMs, Microsoft (And probably Google and Amazon as well) are 4 times more expensive than smaller cloud competitors. Why do people rent VMs from Microsoft for such a crazy premium?
In the app I host on Azure I am using 16 different services offered by Azure. One (1) of them is running VMs. Cloud is so much more that just running virtual machines.
Except for a CDN, what else do you use that you could not run directly on your VM?