Same as kstrauser: Microsoft products are great, but they're more expensive to scale. I've been working with Microsoft products for close to a decade, and I th

Same as kstrauser: Microsoft products are great, but they're more expensive to scale. I've been working with Microsoft products for close to a decade, and I think their software stack is great. However, for my current side project, I went with another platform (Groovy+Grails, running on the JVM), purely because of cost (and also because I wanted to learn it :) ). You can choose to be part of the BizSpark program and get all Microsoft software for free for 3 years, but you have to pay afterwards. Prices for Microsoft software hosting is usually 2 or 3 times what it costs for a mostly equivalent software. For example, something I'm using now (Amazon AWS), the price of a small Linux instance is $0,060/hr, while the equivalent Microsoft instance is $0,091/hr Azure pricing is too expensive for me, I discarded it. If I had money (maybe angel or VC backing), I might have considered it, but it's a bootstrapped side project.