I'm using Azure to host some personal projects. It feels like I'm paying 50$ a month forever now for an Azure App Service Basic Plan. A basic plan is great. It can host multiple sites, they all share the same resources of the server. It's great to host a lot of low traffic sites.

I'm currently looking at how I can lower my cloud hosting bill. The site's I'm hosting don't make much money, so it would be great if it also doesn't cost me much money.

Computer hardware gets cheaper over time. These servers should be a lot cheaper now. But this is not reflected in cloud cost. The price has not changed much in 5 years? Maybe more? I'm not keeping track.

Scott Hanselman used to have a great blog series: "Penny Pinching in the Cloud".

He wrote about optimizing your cloud setup, which services to use, which free tiers to use etc. So you don't pay too much.

One optimization I'm currently doing is migrating from SQL Azure to SQLite. SQLite is more than enough for personal projects. And it's easy to work with in ASP.Net using Entity Framework.

It's simple, just write a db file to disk. It works out of the box on Azure App Service.

It saves almost 5$ per month per database. The cheapest SQL Azure db is currently at $4.8971/month.

There are also option with dynamic scaling and paying for what you use, or a free tier But I've not had luck with that, it would keep using my DB even, running through the free limit or generating more costs than the monthly fixed price. All those bots crawling the internet might keep your database active.