I am using Azure as a development environment, so the basic tier is exactly the use case I need. Unfortunately, I am unable to provision any.
So far, I have tried the following.
Building a new server from scratch as a basic tier.
Reconfiguring a running machine to a Basic
Reconfiguring a deallocated machine.
In all cases a generic error message along the lines of "The server encountered an internal error. Please retry the request." is given.
I'm guessing this is a teething trouble with the Basic tier but I wanted to raise the question in case it is either a) me doing something stupid! b) just happening to me and something I need to raise