When comparing Microsoft Azure vs PythonAnywhere, the Slant community recommends Microsoft Azure for most people. In the question“What are the best cloud platforms as a service providers?” Microsoft Azure is ranked 8th while PythonAnywhere is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Microsoft Azure is:
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.
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 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 Tier
Microsoft Azure offers a Free Tier option that allows you to spawn a BST-1 instance that has 750 free hours.
Pro Easy setup
It's literally a matter of minutes to get a Python-backed website up and running.
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 Excellent customer service
Really fast turnaround, friendly.
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 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 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.