[romaniv]

If you're using MS stack, their web app hosting is really easy to use. One-click publish from VS and auto-running migrations are pretty handy if you want to focus on delivering some prototype fast, rather than mucking around with various admin and deployment tools. I think it's a good selling/entry point for some of their services.

Also, do competing services have anything similar to MS's machine learning services?

[mooreds]

Here's a link to those machine learning services for those who weren't familiar with them (like me): http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/machine-learning/