Azure Blob Storage Pricing
The Azure Pricing is a bit complicated to figure out because there are several factors affecting it:
- Storage Size
- Bandwith Usage
- Storage Usage
Storage Size
In Azure, the pricing is always calculated by your current storage usage. With the exception of the "long-term renting" shown later, you'll pay for your definite usage instead of having a fixed pricing for a fixed storage.
Azure calculates the current cost on a regular basis (e.g. daily), so the storage will get more expencive over time.
An example may look like this:
| Day | Storage Size | Storage Price |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 80GB | 0.049€ |
| 2 | 84GB | 0.052€ |
| 3 | 90GB | 0.056€ |
If we assume that your billing cycle is 3 days, you pay a total of 0.157€ (Day 1 + Day 2 + Day 3) instead of 0.163€ (Day 3 x 3).
Bandwith Usage
Currently there are two different ways your Business Central system may be set up, either fully hosted in the cloud or you are hosting it On Premise on your own machine.
As long as cloud storage is in the same region as the Business Central instance, it's free of charge, so it's highly recommended (not only due to pricing, but also due to performance) to host them in the same region.
The difference between Cloud and OnPrem does not affect the Azure pricing, but it may affect the way where the costs are shown (more on that later):
- Cloud: Blob Storage (Azure) -> Service Tier (External) -> End User
- OnPrem: Blob Storage (External) -> Service Tier (internal/customer network) -> End User
The nodes mentioned with "External" are the ones that count as Bandwith Usage for pricing in Azure.
Every time you open a document or store a document there's going to be data transfer happening.
The current Azure Bandwith pricing is the following:
As you can see, the first 5GB are free each month, each additional GB will cost money (depending on the region).
Because of the variety of customers we have, we have to calculate it individually each time.
As example:
| New Documents | Access Per Document | Average Size | Total GB | Total Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 120 | 4 | 2MB | 0.96GB | 0€ |
| 120 | 8 | 3MB | 2.88GB | 0€ |
| 2230 | 3 | 1MB | 6.69GB | 0.14€ |
| 3154 | 4 | 8MB | 100.93GB | 6.48€ |
Storage Usage
Not only does the storage itself is reflected in the price, accessing it with different operations is, too. Each kind of access, for example read access and write access, count as a operation in Azure:
In theory, those aren't as relevant as the other costs because they're counted in an interval of 10.000 and even with 100.000 for each operation (which should be more than enough) you'll be at around 0.90€.
Difference between OnPrem and Cloud
Depending on how your Business Central is hosted, the pricing seen in the Azure Portal may be at different places:
If you host it in the Cloud, the monthly cost will be applied to the Data Transfer of the Service Tier machine, because that's the "starting location" of external data transfer.
If you host it On Premise, the monthly cost will be shown directly for the Azure Blob Storage.
Calculating the monthly growth of the database
To get an average idea by how much your storage increases we added a report named "DMS Growth Statistic".
You can set a custom timespan (for example, the last month) and it checks how many new documents with the average size were added. Then it checks those values against the total amount of documents with the average size calculated in the earlier step and results an average percentage of the data increase in the customly defined timespan:
Examples (monthly)
| Current Size | Average Doc. Size | Increase | Access | Storage Cost | Bandwith Cost | Operation Cost | Total Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20GB | 3MB | 0.4GB | 4x/Document | ~0.38€ | 0.00€ | 0.90€ | 1.28€ |
| 130GB | 7MB | 2.6GB | 7x/Document | ~2.46€ | 0.95€ | 0.90€ | 4.31€ |
| 300GB | 7MB | 15GB | 11x/Document | ~5.84€ | 10.80€ | 0.90€ | 17.54€ |
| 1.3TB | 16MB | 32GB | 3x/Document | ~24.71€ | 6.15€ | 0.90€ | 31.76€ |
Azure Storage Reserved Capacity
With Azure Blob Storage, you have the possibility to reserve capacity for 1 year or 3 years.
Depending on what you chose, you can save up to 38%. However, you have to know the amount of space needed in advance to make use of this.
Further Information
Azure Pricing Calculator
Guide to Blob Storage Pricing by Microsoft