It strikes me that these cloud hosting companies are really interested in businesses that value growth above profits and are willing to ignore startups who try to manage costs to get to profitability more quickly.
Azure is so inexpensive even without BizSpark it's kind of amazing to me. Having done startups in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, what people have available now is incredible IMO.</old man>
Doesn't sound very reassuring. Do they have a good track record with non-MS stacks?
Their team has been doing good work. For example, Azure had the first/best Docker integration of all the cloud providers. What they had was superseded by docker-machine and swarm eventually, but they were definitely thinking ahead of the curve.
As a user of Azure, I admit that find some aspects of the service unusual, such as requiring users to pick a globally-unique identifier for every server they boot. As in, they ask you to provide a string for your instance's name, then they provide a hostname based on that string; if the hostname (thus the name you pick) is taken, you'll get an error.
I think they've just won favor of startups recently because they've been subsidizing their cloud costs. If theres one thing Microsoft has, its business savvy.
They care about a company's growth, not its profit.
They'd rather get $1M/annum from an unprofitable VC-backed company than $100k/annum from a profitable bootstrap.
All of these providers have multiple levels. There's a cheap option of usually a few hundred or thousand then the upscale option with 5 or 6 figures over a year.
We got into higher tier AWS Activate for $25k/year by just asking. Then we worked with a MS Azure evangelist to get us into the $120k/year program. We would've made it but declined because we asked Softlayer and they gave us $120k/year first and their network was a better fit for us.
Lesson: JUST ASK. There are entire teams of people at these companies who are working to get more customers onboarded and will do whatever they can to help you.
Granted, I'm on Digital Ocean now for my sites (most more cost effective) - but it was fun to play around with while it was free.