Hosting.com vs Microsoft Azure

Hosting.com is strongest for developers wanting fast Turbo/NVMe shared hosting. Microsoft Azure is strongest for enterprises. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Hosting.com (formerly A2 Hosting)	Microsoft Azure
Starting price	$2.99/mo	$0.01/mo
Best for	Developers wanting fast Turbo/NVMe shared hosting Small businesses needing cPanel VPS Agencies needing reseller hosting	Enterprises Windows/.NET workloads Hybrid cloud Regulated industries
Stated uptime SLA	99.9%	99.99%
Storage	NVME	SSD
Regions	4	60
Managed Kubernetes	No	Yes
Support channels	Ticket, Live chat, Phone, Docs/Knowledge base	Ticket, Phone (paid plans), Docs, Community forum
Compliance	Not published	SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, GDPR, PCI DSS
Hidden costs to watch for	Renewal rates are reported at 2-3x the introductory rate across shared hosting tiers Dedicated server and reseller pricing is not published; requires a sales call to obtain a quote Free domain and some promotional pricing require longer-term (12/24/36-month) prepay commitments	Windows Server VMs carry a license surcharge on top of the Linux compute rate Outbound bandwidth billed above 100 GB/month pooled free tier, tiered by volume Premium SSD/Ultra Disk IOPS and throughput billed separately from disk capacity Blob Storage Cool/Cold/Archive tiers bill a minimum 128 KiB per object and impose early-deletion penalties (90/180 day minimums) Archive tier retrieval fees are notably high ($6.50/10,000 read ops) AKS Standard tier control plane fee ($0.10/hr per cluster) on top of node VM costs
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18