Microsoft

About Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation was founded in 1975 and incorporated in Washington in 1981. It is headquartered in Redmond, Washington, United States, and is publicly traded; no parent company is listed here. Microsoft is best known for Windows, Microsoft 365 and Office, Azure cloud services, and Xbox.

Microsoft’s hosting and storage range

CDN

Azure Front Door is a global content-delivery and application-acceleration service. It is intended to help deliver content and applications through a distributed edge network. Our comparison lists features including API support, IPv6, HTTPS, logging and cache purging.

Email hosting

Exchange Online Plan 1 provides hosted business email, calendars, contacts and tasks. It includes webmail and administration tools and is aimed at organizations that need managed email for users.

Online storage

Microsoft offers OneDrive storage through Microsoft 365 Basic, Personal and Family plans, with options for an individual or a family group. Azure Blob Storage Hot is a separate business-oriented option for storing data in Azure. These services suit different needs: personal files and collaboration on one side, and cloud-based business storage on the other.

Servers, data centres and support

Azure operates across regions in many countries and geographies, and customers choose a region for supported deployments. Azure Front Door is a global service whose configuration is distributed across edge locations. Microsoft 365 data locations depend on the service and account or tenant, so the location for a particular customer cannot be determined from the product name alone.

Support options vary by product and account. Microsoft personal-account users can get online help, with chat or a support-agent callback potentially available depending on the product, issue and operating hours. Microsoft states that English technical support for Microsoft 365 business customers is available around the clock through requests opened in the admin center.

Who should consider Microsoft?

Microsoft may suit individuals who want OneDrive alongside Microsoft 365, businesses looking for hosted Exchange email, and organizations already using Azure that need storage or content delivery. Look elsewhere if you specifically need a conventional shared or VPS web-hosting plan: those are not among the services listed in our Microsoft comparison. Check the features and terms of the specific Microsoft product rather than assuming they are uniform across the range.

Read our full Microsoft review, or compare CDN services, email hosting and online storage.