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Azure's pricing seem optimized either for medium to big sites (who need more than 2 front-end servers, hence would benefit from the per-hour pricing) or for agencies that will host multiple sites on the same server. Also, Azure is more "managed" than AWS or Linode. That is, you just write your application code and push it to the servers. There's no sysadmin work to do, nothing to install and configure but your own code.

Cheapest is actually $39.99. For some reason, that pricing calculator doesn't give the option for the extra small compute size, which is $30 a month. Check out this link which has more detail:

https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/advanc...

Azure is not as cheap as most hosting; especially since if you want to stay up during failover you need more than one instance.