(full disclosure, I'm a founder at Cloudant) Thanks for the kind words jot. The guys behind couch.io are smart and talented, and they really know their couchd

(full disclosure, I'm a founder at Cloudant) Thanks for the kind words jot. The guys behind couch.io are smart and talented, and they really know their couchdb, but I don't think that hosting is their primary focus (they can correct me if I'm wrong). The main technical difference between us and couch.io is the distribution (clustering) layer we've built. This allows a single couch database to be spread across multiple servers. It provides true horizontal scalability, not just multi-master replication. A database can expand elastically based on resource and concurrency needs. In our next release we'll be adding the ability to tune robustness via quorum constants (a la Amazon's dynamo) on a per-document basis. That should be coming soon.