I'd wager that Azure is targeting a very different part of the market. There were some really handy things in Azure, and there's some really handy things about Digital Ocean. In the end, Azure is not chasing people who only want to pay $5/mo for a server.

I've had a few issues with Azure myself, but that never caused me to question the pricetag.

Will not treating DO as a serious threat come back to bite them? Quite possibly. Are they worried about it right now? Seems not.

Azure doesn't seem to be at all competitive with Amazon either. Azure A1 (1 "Core", ~2GB RAM)'s 1.5x more expensive than Amazon's similar offering. Is that difference due to Windows licensing?

With Azure you get two servers backing up each server, I think.

Same fundamental reason why AWS charges $120 / month for 1tb of bandwidth, and for $5 / month you get 1tb with Digital Ocean - they're targeting the market in a very different way compared to Digital Ocean.

Well DO is advertising 1tb for $5 because they expect most people not to hit that rate or that price would quickly skyrocket. AWS is just taking the pricing scheme of pay for what you use (granted there is still a premium on every thing they charge you for)

That's not accurate. DO's bandwidth is simply cheap, it doesn't matter what tier you go with or how much you use. The $5 plan is merely a convenient illustration, as they embarrass AWS on bandwidth cost across the board. At $0.02 per gb on overages, it's six times cheaper than the 10tb AWS tier.

To match DO with AWS on bandwidth cost, you need to burn a few petabytes.

10tb on AWS? $1,200. Given how cheap bandwidth is these days, that's beyond outrageous. Amazon is charging for bandwidth roughly a hundred times what it costs them.

Now let's say you're actually heavy utilizing DO, so you've got one of their bigger plans and burn up plenty of bandwidth. Their $480 plan comes with 8tb, and the extra 2tb (to match 10tb on AWS), will cost you a mere $40. 16 cores, 48gb of ram, 10tb of bandwidth, for $520.

Of course it's understood people use AWS for reasons other than price.

I'd expect DigitalOcean's bandwidth is still at quite a bit of a profit.

I run a reliable Tor relay with a 12TB allocation for $7/mo, admittedly from a sketchy provider, of which I use almost the entire allocation. My main hosting provider (for my website, email, etc) sells shared gigabit bandwidth at $2.50/TB, half DO's price, which they apparently still make a profit on.

On top of that, DO is doing this on a much larger scale than many of these other companies, which should allow them to obtain better prices.

Idk about the pricing but can you use all that bandwidth in a reasonable time period?

Can DO's pipes handle a sustained load of whatever a 16core 48gb ram machine can handle without their pipe being the bottleneck?

If not maybe that is part of the reason AWS can charge so much for bandwidth.

You get what you pay for.

Example: when you pay for an overpriced service, you get an overpriced service. That's Causality 101.

In other words, please elaborate and provide some facts!

Azure has suffered from some major world wide outages. Never understood why its so expensive.

Azure has 10 times more functionality (probably 50x more really). If you want cheap then go for DO, if you want features that will save you that 100 times over by reducing development and management time then go Azure.

Because Azure is targeting the enterprises (government, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, etc), not Aunt Jean's Nail Salon and Tackle Shop. When big business sees $10/mo, you may just as well said it was free. $10,000/mo - that's affordable with a service level agreement and support.