How much does a SharePoint farm in Microsoft Azure cost?
Last month, I created a step by step tutorial on how to Create a SharePoint 2013 Farm in Azure Step by Step by using the new “SharePoint Farm” template in the new (and still beta) Azure portal.
One of the most popular questions I got is how much does a farm in azure cost? So, I decided to sacrifice my monthly Azure credits for the community in order to give you the exact answer.
So by using the same step by step I started to create my farm at exactly 1PM on Day 0. I created a SharePoint farm that respects the SharePoint Minimum requirements and should be able to run a good development environment without any problems. At the moment of starting the wizard, I had exactly 157.48$ left on my MSDN Subscription.
| DC | SQL | SharePoint | |
| VM Template | A1 | A5 | A4 |
| RAM | 1.75 GB | 14 GB | 14 GB |
| Number of Cores | 1 | 2 | 8 |
The SharePoint Farm was successfully deployed at 2:18 PM on Day1 and I used it very lightly for about one hour.
In order to determine when exactly my credits finished, I used the email that Azure sends when your credits run out. So, I received the email at 4:48 PM on Day 8. Therefore, 157$ gives us about 194.5 hours of a SharePoint farm in Azure. So, if you work about 9h per day, for 20 days a month, that makes 180h so, provided you turn off your Virtual Machines at night, you should have enough time to run your SharePoint farm for free in Azure!
However, please note that under heavy usage, you might have a lot more bandwidth & storage usage than I did on the farm I barely even played it, so you might get a little less time than I got in this test.
If anyone has other metrics that they took from their experiments with SharePoint in Azure or tips on how to make your SharePoint farm last longer on the credit, please do not hesitate to share!
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