[GordonS]

You do get some free storage with the free tier database, but it is only a paltry 32MB. Additional storage is only $0.221/GB/m though. The paid cheapest SQL database (B0) is only $5/m, which comes with 2GB of storage. In practise, this is absolutely fine for light usage.

By .NET + SQL, I assume you mean you were using an App Service? They come with a lot of convenience, but I definitely agree that they are too expensive, especially when considering the level of compute you get. I raised this with someone from Microsoft before, and they said they were confident the value offered was worth it.

There is a free tier for App Service though. It's a shared compute model - I tried it a while back, and the performance was totally fine for light usage.

I wouldn't try to run Windows Server on a B1S, as they only have 1GB of RAM :) You might just about get away with it for Server Nano, but I've never actually used it. Best stick with Linux or BSD for these tiny VMs.