Missed the real answer: In your cage at the local colo.<p>The sweet spot for the Microsoft stack is one beefy server. While you can rent that from a cloud provider, you're just plain always going to get a better deal by building your own box and dropping it in a datacenter.<p>It's not anywhere near as daunting as it seems to do so, and it will run you about $400/month all in, amortized out over a 3 year box lifetime even including licenses.<p>That'll get you the firepower of a medium sized cluster of Linux gear running your open source stack of choice, without having to deal with a dozen virtual machines spinning up and down to deal with load. It'll just handle as much traffic as you can throw at it, up to the point where you're big enough to simply pull a half dozen of your hundred devs off what they're doing to help scale you up.<p>That's probably the reason you don't see many .net paas companies around. For the most part, they're not the right tool for the job.
Interesting list. Though I didn't see much consideration to Mono on Linux, which is my personal deployment strategy.<p>It would have been nice if it was compiled in to a larger comparison table so I could see it all on my widescreen display, but an interesting read nonetheless.
Happy to see some .NET posts on here! Also, comments that doesn't include bashing over the evil M$ and how they will rip your startup apart.<p>Very nice list, i was not aware of many of these solutions. I have used Azure for my private sites before, and it is a really nice solution.<p>Scott Hanselman wrote an interesting article, comparing Azure Web Sites to your $5/Month Host. Read it here: <a href="http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PennyPinchingInTheCloudWhenDoAzureWebsitesMakeSense.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PennyPinchingInTheCloudWhenDoA...</a>
I've been using appharbor for a long time and I've been very happy. The recent additions of spdy and web sockets is really great....they've been very active in integrating with other providers. It is pretty shocking how easy it is to spin up a $10/month 10GB sql server instance. And in general, it 'just works'.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I would have just thought "Azure and done" but it's nice to see that there are other options in this ecosystem.
Here are some more suitable (reliable and inexpensive) options (based on first-hand experience and research/testimonials):<p>VPS: AppliedI (<a href="http://www.appliedi.net" rel="nofollow">http://www.appliedi.net</a>) or UltimaSystems (<a href="http://www.ultimasystems.net" rel="nofollow">http://www.ultimasystems.net</a>)<p>Cloud: Azure or AWS (or even DigitalOcean or Linode if possible to run under Mono)<p>Dedicated: ReliableSite (<a href="http://www.reliablesite.net" rel="nofollow">http://www.reliablesite.net</a>) or OVH Canada (<a href="http://www.ovh.com/us/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ovh.com/us/</a>) or Hivelocity (<a href="https://hivelocity.net" rel="nofollow">https://hivelocity.net</a>)