[danielcampos93]

seems like mostly updating to the newest models and making the entry level sku's much cheaper to attract more people kicking the wheels and lower the bar for dev's wanting to try out Azure. I would love to see they take this to an extreme and either make the A0 or A1 free like AWS.

[shiftpgdn]

The A0 standard and the A0 basic prices did not change. Both of those instances will be dramatically outperformed by a Linode VPS or Digital Ocean droplet for 1/2 to 1/3rd the price.

[dragontamer]

Well, so are Amazon's lowest tier nodes. I think its fair to say that AWS and Azure aren't competing against cheap VPS like Linode or Digital Ocean.

Frankly, I'm beginning to think that things are swinging back to dedicated. I'm seeing ~$30 to ~$50 / month deals on a lot of dedicated servers (years old Xeon boxes), which have the main advantage of dedicated I/O. (No "neighbors" eating up the SSD or HDD IOPS).

https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/

https://www.kimsufi.com/uk/servers.xml

For a certain scale, aiming at dedicated is probably cheaper, especially when you consider how much faster a dedicated SSD box is than a shared VPS.

The main benefits of AWS (or Azure) are all of the other features they offer on their platform. But I don't think that they are low-cost anymore, especially in today's world with ~$42/month dedicated SSD Xeon servers.

[kuschku]

You might also want to add https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40 to your list of cheap dedicated servers.

It’s seriously crazy how expensive AWS, Azure, and co are.

[mark_l_watson]

I will add my thanks for your nocix suggestion. I prefer to do my development on a beefy VPS, most often from OVH, but I think I will try switching to novix for a few months. (I don't like my laptop heating up or running out of capacity, and it is nicer to have a dev setup that I can hit from any laptop (or tablet)). For development, I don't need super high reliability.

[dragontamer]

Well, development seems more like a VPS job, since you aren't going to be utilizing the CPU too much.

I think high-load web servers (which will be hitting the disk often) or video game servers (especially world-simulations like Minecraft or Factorio) that will benefit from dedicated servers the most.

But give it a shot. I know that the higher-cost VPS are more expensive than those dedicated boxes. I'm also surprised at how cheap dedicated has gotten recently.

[mark_l_watson]

I do have high CPU utilization tasks, like large Haskell builds, Tensoflow, etc. I agree that the cheap physical server costs are surprising, given facility and power costs.

[valarauca1]

Wow thanks for the Nocix link. I never came across them before. That is dirt cheap.

[blahi]

You have $25/month for free for a year... And $200 free trial.

You also get credits when buying VS/MSDN.

[Someone1234]

> You also get credits when buying VS/MSDN.

For non-production use only. There's a lot of fine print on the MSDN "free credit."