[netsentialuser]

This is a throwaway account as I will be mentioning some slightly sensitive personal details.

I do not currently work in law enforcement or intelligence, but for various reasons from some years ago to the present I have been a member of one of the fusion-center-type communities which Netsential hosts. A small amount of my personal information is included in the breach as a result, but of course, this is far from the first time that's happened to me.

I think you have somewhat of a misunderstanding about Netsential's service offerings. While they do provide physical hosting, that is not their primary product, they are not used for "managing the physical servers (think Dell blade computers for instance) that these websites ran on top of" as you say in the blog post. This is only incidental. Their primary product is the software, which is not very good from either a code quality or user experience perspective, but is reasonably unique in its capabilities. They offer a completely "turnkey" solution, including for example a telephone technical support/customer service line for users of the portals that they staff and handles routine things like password resets.

They're not a hosting company, they are primarily a SaaS operation that also does some custom software development.

So it's not at all true that there's no reason to use them over a cheaper service like Azure. These organizations would need to hire some other company to develop the software if they did that, and that would end up costing them more because they'd be looking at a semi-custom project (COTS CMS solutions would partially meet the needs) rather than "just another license" with Netsential.