Our new ceo force migrated us to office365 from gmail and our experience so far is not par with gmail. Very lacking or even unusable ui, not working or frustrating filters, very bad experience with imap clients unread email appearing read. And the very best part; there is no select all :)

And the shameless plug: Also your idea about selling migration services is very interesting. If any one is in need of system administration, integration, performance analysis, optimization, configuration management and devops like services I'm here to help.

They have two separate admin interfaces, neither of which you can do everything in so you have to break out powershell to finish off the job. The client had to lean heavily on me to help, something other clients have never had to do with gmail.

I like a lot of MS products, but from my brief exposure, exchange is a complete mess of WTFs. And annoyingly, googling doesn't often bring up pertinent answers and their help is pathetic.

Gmail is not flaky the way O365 is. Random outages with no explanation/contact from support until days after remedy...are no fun.

Otherwise, I don't see why small shops wanna move away from gmail to O365.

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.

- 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.

Been playing with CoreOS though...

If you're just running instances then maybe it's not too much work - though you're still going to have to think about backup / restore, access control, autoscaling (maybe), cost tracking / allocation, etc...

I'm sure Microsoft are banking on a profitable percentage of YC companies becoming so wedded to that Azure systems that the opportunity cost of switching to AWS is too high.

Edit: Typo

You can spin up your own load balancer pretty easily. DO offers backup too.

In terms of bang for the buck, you can't really beat DO, unless you're giving your services away for free ...

http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/02/digitalocean-fixes-securit...

In short, unless you have inside information, there is not enough information to determine which company is more competent or more trustworthy - it's not possible to judge which company you should trust with your business based on the available facts in an objective way currently, as the available data is easily attributable to simple bad luck.

In contrast, the performance difference is objectively measurable: http://joshtronic.com/2014/06/22/ten-dollar-showdown-linode-...

Regardless, I don't see how you can judge someone who's had at least two breaches more competent than someone who had zero. In all probability, DO didn't have any breaches precisely because they are more competent.

If you treat DO as just another VPS provider and pay on a monthly basis does it offer advantages over the competition?

[0] https://puphpet.com

The post mentions that this is only for new YC startups, i.e. folks that won't have anything (or very little) to migrate.

Bundle that with cleaverly designed vendor lockin and General poor UX and you've got yourself a real headache.

We think this is a great way for startups to use the tons of cloud credits they get, instead of letting them go to waste or spending precious time on setting up infrastructure.