Fluffy Cloud Configurations For .NET

Question

Very simple question, is there any cloud server enviroments avaliable these days for us .NET guys that rivals Amazons ec2?

EDIT:

PDC 2008 looks like there are some very interesting info, and only 4 days 2 hours to wait :-). Looks like I need to get saving fast for the conference fee though.

Answer 1

Hold your breath for PDC 2008 and you'll see. Also Amazon's EC2 service support for Windows images is in Beta. AWS Windows Support Blog Post

Oct 23 Update : AWS Windows Support Released To Production (details here)

Oct 27th Update : So you held your breath and saw the Reddog folk become "Windows Azure" cloud services and Sitka - SQL Server Data Services. Lots of activity to read and learn at MSDN, MS PDC site, Channel 9 etc. Have fun!

Answer 2

I use Mosso, a subsidiary of Rackspace. I've been pleased with them.

You can run PHP, Perl, .NET, and RoR on their system. MySQL as well as SQL Server.

http://www.mosso.com

Answer 3

Check out Sql Server Data Services and make sure to tune in to PDC 2008 next week.

Answer 4

It's not public yet but EasyDb is very .net-focused, it wraps your tables into an ASMX web service. There was a dnrtv episode on it, http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showNum=121

Answer 5

We took Mosso for a trial run earlier this year, and it was disastrous. On a number of criteria - uptime, customer service, flexibility - we would have been better off a $6/month shared hosting account. And they changed their pricing model midstream from a per-request model to a per-"compute cycle" model, the "compute cycle" being a mysterious proprietary metric that's impossible to optimize for because you don't know how it's calculated - the end result being that you could suddenly find yourself on the hook for thousands of dollars in charges for no good reason.