Recommendations for .NET cloud service provider

Question

Apologies for the vague question, I am looking for pointers rather than exact answers. I have an application I am developing in Silverlight which requires some back-end persistent data. I can certainly do this myself using IIS / SQL Server, but I am eager to learn something new!

Are there any suitable, free, cloud services I could use? A bit like Google App Engine, but preferably allowing me to use the .NET stack, eg via a WCF connection to my client.

As this is just for learning purposes I don't have many requirements regarding data volumes etc, however, it would be nice if I could run some scheduled services on my data in the cloud, eg some statistics calculations every hour.

Any pointers?

Answer 1

You can get Azure free for 30 days here . If you have a premium/ultimate MSDN subscription, you can get Azure free for 8 months.

Answer 2

if it's only a test and you do not expect high volume you could do with Windows Azure and SQL Azure, at least you learn how to deal with leading products and if afterwards you decide to develop something more commercial, you will reuse the know how. I do believe for testing reasons or low volume you should get it either for free or extremely cheap.

Answer 3

Try EyeOS . You can go for the trial version and test your applications.

Others are

• icloud
• Cloudo
• Force