Azure Pricing Tiers - Cores Per Instance or Plan?

Question

I'm trying to fully understand the Azure pricing model and just need a little clarification.

If I choose the standard tier for an Azure web app, I know that I can have any number of web apps / websites, and 10 instances at 1 core and 1.75gb of ram.

Now, what I'd like to know is if that means EACH instances gets 1 core and 1.75gb of ram, or that the total hardware power is 1 core and 1.75gb over all instances? There's a huge difference. Also, I'm assuming that each of these instances could potentially be running on different machines in different locations (though all in the same region). And I believe I understand that all of my websites under this pricing tier will be duplicated to all of the instances, based on the number I specify.

I'm pretty sure it means that each instance will get the stated physical hardware specs, so in essence I am getting the power of a maximum of 10 machines (though maybe not technically). Is this understanding correct?

As a secondary question: why are cloud services so much cheaper? They still have a domain and can be used for a website / web app.

Thanks, Sam

Answer 1

This page seems to answer the question: the physical hardware specs refer to each instance, not the total power of all instances together:

What exactly are Windows Azure Instances?

My apologies for posting a question which I now realize is off topic.