Sorry, should have clarified. Most early stage startups don't do DevOps or sysadmin well. Imagine the typical YC startup where its just 2-3 developers who are comfortable with the command line, but not comfortable with Chef, Puppet, etc. Having to plan a migration is not fun or productive for a set of developers because it means (1) less time for them to focus on mobile/web development (2) learning to do sysadmin when it's out of their comfort zone.
AWS and Azure are great, but when things get complicated, it means having good resources to help is critical.
note - from what I know, most early stage YC companies just use Heroku to solve many of these problems anyway.
Actually Microsoft has not one but two Platform-as-a-Service offerings:
- Azure Cloud Services (PaaS)
- Azure Websites (PaaS light)
Unfortunately, when I last looked at it two months ago, both of them were quite unattractive, at least for Python hosting.
First of all, they have no support for automatically installing python dependencies, i.e. no support for pip. If you want to install e.g. django-rest-framework, you have to install it locally and then manually copy the installed files to Azure (with FTP, if I remember correctly).
Secondly, they both run Python on a Windows Server running behind the IIS web server. Besides the fact that you will walk along the road less travelled (Django is overwhelmingly deployed on Linux), there is a very concrete limitation: if you want to install binary packages (e.g. PIL or Pillow), you have to manually compile them for Windows (and of course copy them manually to your Azure server). Yuck.
If you want to use Azure, go with their IaaS offering (Azure Virtual Machines) and stay away from their PaaS offerings.
Wild... didn't know that. I've been doing mostly node with some C# for the past 3 years... just double checked MS WebMatrix and nope, doesn't look like Ruby is in the box...
AWS and Azure are great, but when things get complicated, it means having good resources to help is critical.
note - from what I know, most early stage YC companies just use Heroku to solve many of these problems anyway.