Windows Azure Compute Hours include the time your Deployment is Stopped

One of my tenets on this blog is to not do posts that simply point to someone else’s post.  I’m breaking that tenant today because of something I just found out that I think is super important for all Windows Azure customers to be clear on and saw that Ryan Dunn had already posted about this.

Windows Azure compute time is calculated based on the time that you’ve deployed the app, not the time your app is in the running state.

For example, if you put your deployment in the stopped state, you will continue to be charged for Compute hours – the rate at which will correspond to the VM Size you have selected.

In order to not be charged Compute hours, you need to delete the deployment.  This will look as follows:

Ryan goes on to show you how to use the powershell cmdlets to automate deleting your deployments, please check out his post.

We are working on making this more obvious on the developer portal.