Today we announced that as of October 1st, 2011 we will be reducing the price of an extra-small instance by 20%. The other big news is that all instances will not be charged based on ‘small instance’ equivalent hours.
There are some programs where you can receive ‘free’ hours in Windows Azure. Before this announcement, if you were allocated Small instance hours, then you would be billed if you used Extra Small instance hours instead. Many people make this mistake, thinking they will use their hours slower by using fewer resources.
Now, if you use Extra Small instances, they will be converted to small instance hour equivalents at a three to one ratio. In essence, you can now swap hours from size to size. Hours allocations for MSDN have been adjusted, see the chart on the official announcement.
We also made some announcements about how bandwidth is metered and charged. If you use a fair amount of bandwidth, then you will want to understand the changes.
This is on the tails of our announcement that all inbound data bandwidth is free.
Get all of the gory details at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/08/15/announcing-simplified-data-transfer-billing-meters-and-swappable-compute-instancess.aspx.