The BizSpark program should be a major draw as well. I just don't think everyone knows about it and the fact that Microsoft will give your startup or even "startup" $150 in Azure credits per month for three years, as well as an ultimate MSDN subscription, both of which can be expanded to multiple accounts for your company or friends so each additional account also gets $150 a month and their own msdn subscription, etc.

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/offers/ms-azr-0064p/

http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/default.aspx

I read something the other day that seemed to indicate it's $150 per person in BizSpark. That is, if you're in my company and we both have a BizSpark account we can both make subscriptions on Azure and get the $150 per month _per_ subscription.

We're taking advantage of the $150 and staying within it, but once we go live we'll need to expand. We will definitely investigate that.

Yes, that's what I was trying to get across. Could probably word it better but it's $150 per month, per account you extend your BizSpark account/benefits to.

So if person A signs up for BizSpark, then can then invite x amount of people to their companies BizSpark account and the $150/month and MSDN etc. benefits are also given to those other people. So Person A, B, C, D, etc. will each have their own Bizspark/outlook/azure account and each gets $150 a month in credits, and each has their own ultimate msdn subscription for 3 years.

Yup, exactly this. My own startups are running on Azure thanks to BizSpark, and so is my full-time job. It's a pretty ridiculous amount of free stuff.

Maybe because Linux people aren't interested in Microsoft infra?

Also, they will have only HVM Linux VMs, and last I checked paravirt Xen (what most AWS runs, probably also Linode, maybe DO) tends to be faster than HVM.

DO runs KVM in case anyone reading this is wondering.