MS's Azure is a big FAIL for individual devs
The problem with Azure is not the hourly compute rates. It's the fact that you get charged per hour of uptime, not per hour of usage. This means for an always on application you end up paying a minimum of $35/month - which is rediculous for small apps. OK, you get built-in scaling, but the hobbyist developer this is targeting isn't interested in that in the first instance.
Better go with Google App Engine which is free up to a point.