Microsoft Azure vs IONOS

Microsoft Azure is strongest for enterprises. IONOS is strongest for budget shared/VPS hosting. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Microsoft Azure	IONOS
Starting price	$0.01/mo	$0.02/mo
Best for	Enterprises Windows/.NET workloads Hybrid cloud Regulated industries	Budget shared/VPS hosting Windows workloads EU-based data residency Granular building-block cloud pricing
Stated uptime SLA	99.99%	99.99%
Storage	SSD	NVME
Regions	60	6
Managed Kubernetes	Yes	Yes
Support channels	Ticket, Phone (paid plans), Docs, Community forum	24/7 Phone, Ticket, Docs, Live Chat
Compliance	SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, GDPR, PCI DSS	GDPR, ISO 27001
Hidden costs to watch for	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	Intro pricing on VPS+ and Web Hosting plans (e.g. $2/mo, $1/mo) is a 3-month or 1-year promotional rate on a 1-year contract; renewal pricing after the promo/contract period is 2-6x higher Additional static IPv4 addresses billed at $6.00 per 30 days each Outbound data transfer beyond the free 2TB pooled allowance is tiered: $0.036/GB (2-10TB), dropping to $0.018/GB beyond 150TB Windows Server and RedHat Enterprise Linux require separate per-vCPU/core license surcharges on top of Compute Engine/Cube pricing IONOS CLOUD Compute Engine building-block pricing (Cores + RAM + Storage priced independently) can be harder to estimate than fixed-tier competitors without using their price calculator
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18