How are Windows Azure Compute hours metered?
Windows Azure compute hours are charged only when your application is deployed. When developing and testing your application, developers will want to remove the compute instances that are not being used to minimize compute hour billing. Please note that suspending your deployment will still result in compute charges since the compute instances are still allocated to you and cannot be allocated to another customer. Compute hours are billed based on the number of clock hours your service was deployed multiplied by the number of compute instances. All compute hours are converted into small instance hours when presented on your bill. For example, one elapsed hour of a medium compute instance would be presented as two small compute instance hours at the small instance rate of $0.12 per hour on your bill. This table describes how each of the compute instance sizes correlates to the number of small compute instance hours: Compute hours are billed based on the number of clock hours your servic
