I'm trying to create a new virtual machine. On that machine I plan to host a few MVC websites and install SQL Server. I'm looking at the options for the server OS and it looks like the lowest-cost OS should be "HPC Pack 2012 R2 Compute Node on Windows Server 2012 R2". However, this option is $178 / mo as the lowest tier option for this OS is A3, which is super expensive.
Right now I'm hosting all of these sites on an old Windows Server 2003 machine from 2006. It has an AMD 2200+ and 4GB of RAM and is still very responsive. Since the Windows OS will take up 30GB of space on its own I of course will need at least 50 GB of drive space so that I can fit my own things on the server (database, site files, extra space for installation files, etc) but it doesn't have to be a high-performance disk by any means. I'm confused as to why the cheapest option available to me seems to be so costly? I've compared with AWS and AlphaRack, they are both < $20 for what I need. I'm thinking maybe I'm just not familiar enough with Azure to know how to ratchet it down to what I need.
I would appreciate any help!