Why is Azure SQL database so expensive?

Question

For a small personal coding project I recently created a SQL database in Azure. For the past weeks I have been hardly using the database, out of 2 GB available space I have been using only 13 MB.

However, the database costs me 6,70 EUR per day and I don't understand why this is the case. Read a few topics/posts stating that the costs with similar use should be around 5-7 EUR per month, not per day.

This is the configuration for the database:

• No elastic pool
• General purpose, Gen5, 2 vCores
• West Europe

Does anyone have an idea about what could be causing the costs per month to be so high?

Answer 1

You're paying for the entire infrastructure is why. It really only saves on upfront cost. A dedicated server, Windows Server + SQL Server Web will run you, at least $5K. Performance wise, a dedicated server at a colo center will be a lot cheaper to run once you get the hardware. I know, I've switched several companies off of Azure and, instead of paying $2500/mo, they pay $200/mo (after the server) for 4U at a colo + $100/mo basic maintenance and 1TB/mo bandwidth, so it adds up. For example, I built 2 custom 1U servers (12 core/32GB) for $8500 and an opensource router for another $500 (pfSense), including OSes & SQL Server Web. Initial setup of both servers including SQL and the router for 16 IP Addresses was about $1K. Total cost was $10K up front. The equivalent horsepower and storage from Azure was $2500/mo. In 1 year on Azure it ran $30K! 1 year on colo (hosting + maintenance) was $13600, the following year was $3600. So far in 5 years, they saved ~$122,000. There was only 15mins of downtime during the entire period. Cloud hosting is a great idea, but it will never save you time nor money at the rates these company's charge. As far as downtime, I have been hosting for 2 decades and the worst downtime happened due to a network failure (that also took out multiple cloud providers) and it was 13 hours. The only other one was due to a fried router (about 3 hours). Just my take on it - Cloud hosting is still way too expensive for what you actually get & redundancy is nice but you can buy a new server every 2 months for the price difference (just get good equipment w/redundant power supplies and hot swap drives - in a 55 degree colo center, failures are rare)