When comparing Microsoft Azure vs PythonAnywhere, the Slant community recommends PythonAnywhere for most people. In the question“What are the best cloud platforms as a service providers?” PythonAnywhere is ranked 7th while Microsoft Azure is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose PythonAnywhere is:
You can run a website at USERNAME.pythonanywhere.com for free, and it's good enough for a light-traffic website -- it runs 24/7. You get a free MySQL or SQLite database too.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Supports running Windows Server
Most, if not all, of the major cloud PaaS providers offer a Linux variant to host your applications. Windows Azure, being a Microsoft product obviously, supports Windows in addition to Linux.
Pro Free Tier
Microsoft Azure offers a Free Tier option that allows you to spawn a BST-1 instance that has 750 free hours.
Pro Linux Instances
The Azure platform has been supporting Linux VMs for a while now and has Linux distributions readily available in the catalogue.
Pro Free option
You can run a website at USERNAME.pythonanywhere.com for free, and it's good enough for a light-traffic website -- it runs 24/7. You get a free MySQL or SQLite database too.
Pro Excellent customer service
Really fast turnaround, friendly.
Pro Easy scaling
You pay for a number of "Workers" for your web app (to handle requests), or CPU seconds for code that you run outside a web app, and you can get more workers or CPU seconds by upgrading your plan any time.
Pro Easy setup
It's literally a matter of minutes to get a Python-backed website up and running.
Pro Not too expensive
A basic site with no custom domain is free. $5 a month will afford the user enough power for a typical 100,000 hit a day website.
Pro Flexible payments
You can pay monthly and cancel any time, or pay for a year up front to get a discount.
Cons
Con Expensive
Even though in the context of Pay-as-you-go services, it's cost effective, but monthly pricing for these services are quite higher than competitors.
Con No WebSocket support
Con Python-only on the server side
Obviously you can put JavaScript in your web pages and so on, but you can't use Rails or Node.