Updated pricing for Extra Small Instances

In a recent announcement, we made a few changes to how Extra Small instances are charged in Windows Azure. There are mainly three pieces of news:

  1. A price cut of 20% for the XS instances
  2. A translation formula for simplified purchasing of XS instances (previously, you couldn’t use a “small instance” credit for running XS instances – now, you will get 3 hours of XS instances for 1 hour of small instance runtime)
  3. A simplification of the Windows Azure special offers – no more “x hours of Small + y hours of X-Small” formulas, instead, you will receive a certain credit of small instance hours

Details are here: blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/08/15/announcing-simplified-data-transfer-billing-meters-and-swappable-compute-instancess.aspx