Simple socket-based server on cloud

I am writing an application that listens for incoming connections on specific ports. The clients are GPS tracking devices installed on cars and the server is currently implemented in .NET using asynchronous sockets. Everything works fine, but I am thinking of moving the server to a cloud service such as Azure in order to relieve myself of the chore of taking care of the hardware which may fail at any time.

My question is: can the cloud server offer me a fixed 开发者_运维百科IP address on which my code would listen on a specific port? The server does little processing (some NMEA sentence parsing) so I think the cost of hosting on the cloud would not be high. Any hints are appreciated.

In windows Azure you get a fixed DNS name, which would resolve to the currently assigned IP address (keep in mind Load balancing, if running more than worker role).

In Rackspace cloud you get a fixed IP address. In Amazon EC2 you have something like Elastic IP

You can fix the external port number, but the ip address would vary if you create more instances of the role.