Azure VM: Stopped (still incurring compute charges)

Question

_{Sunday, July 10, 2016 4:16 PM}

Greetings,

My understanding was that when an Azure VM is stopped, I would not pay for compute and I only pay for storage. 

I am getting below message on top of my stopped VM

Stopped (still incurring compute charges)

Does this mean that I am paying for the VM even when it is not started?

Thank you,

All replies (4)

_{Monday, July 11, 2016 7:15 AM ✅Answered | 6 votes}

Hi,

Thank you for posting here! We are happy to assist you.

If you shut down your VM from the OS itself, it will stop the VM but not deallocate it. You will need to stop if from the portal or from PowerShell. If you shut down your VM form the OS, it will continue being billed.

If you stop the VM from the management portal or through PowerShell, you won’t be billed for the VM. Please make sure that the VMs are in the status "Stopped (Deallocated)" in the Windows Azure management portal.

If you have a free subscription and once the free credit is over and if you have removed the spending limit, then your credit card will be charged for the services that you use, and if you have not set the spending limit, then you won’t be able to use any services, the subscription will be disabled and you won’t be billed.

When you set your VM as Stop(Deallocated) status, you are not being billed the hourly compute time for the VM while it is in that state. "Deallocated" means that the VM configuration is no longer being actively associated with fabric resources, such as virtual CPUs, memory and networks. In this state, the VM will not continue to allocate compute charges, but since fabric resources are deallocated, the VM could receive a different internal IP address (called "Dynamic IPs" or "DIPs" in Windows Azure) the next time it is started. 

I would recommend you could refer to the Craig's post and the blog from the below mentioned link:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsazure/en-US/f608528e-a9f8-45b3-8d23-4211168cc087/stopped-deallocated
(http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithmayer/archive/2013/06/19/windows-azure-virtual-machines-there-s-more-than-1-way-to-shutdown-a-vm.aspx ) for more details.

If you have any questions about billing, you can contact the azure support via

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/options/

Regards,
Sumanth BM

_{Sunday, January 21, 2018 2:28 PM}

This is NOT true. @SumanthBM, I use Auto-Shutdown from the portal and my VM continues to burn at the same rate as if it is running. It clearly indicates that it is stopped (deallocated) but it has used $100 this month without even being started once!  There is no storage other than the VM image.
So what you say is not accurate.
Larry

_{Tuesday, January 23, 2018 2:16 PM}

Billing and Subscription team would be the best to provide more insight and guidance on this scenario: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/options/it's free, and it's the best choice for you.

Do click on "Mark as Answer" on the post that helps you, this can be beneficial to other community members

_{Saturday, February 10, 2018 11:58 PM}

I got hit with $160 this month. It looks like the storage i was using within the VM was premium SSD. You get charged for storage even if the VM is deallocated.