To answer the original question:

Both http://www.intelequia.com and http://www.ipista.com are running on Windows Azure using the DNN Azure accelerator (http://dnnazureaccelerator.codeplex.com/) .  Keep in mind that both of those sites are running out of a European datacenter so latency will be a bit higher than for a north american hosted site.  To see the performance you can expect from a Windows Azure hosted site, signup for a free PE Trial http://bit.ly/dnntrial . All of our trials are running on Windows Azure using the Azure Services for Windows Server.

Intelequia is running on an extra small instance and the monthly costs would be on the order of magnitude of between $20-$30 (depending on whether they are on pay as you go pricing or a longer 6 month or 12 month commitment) which includes storage, hosting and SQL Azure.  Depending on your needs, you might need to increase your instance to a small instance which is roughly $86/mos instead of $14/mos for just the extra small.

Running DNN on Windows Azure can be a very cost effective means of hosting DotNetNuke if you understand the benefits of cloud computing and compare apples to apples.  Windows Azure hosting may not be right for every company, but I would definitely suggest you see if the benefits align with your own business needs.

Cloud computing is fundamentally about making the most efficient use of a large set of shared resources.  Where customers benefit is from the ability to run applications in an environment that is highly scalable, highly reliable and highly available.  I often see people comparing their own self hosting with that offered by the cloud platforms like AWS or Azure which is not really a fair comparison since I have seen few businesses which are running in a highly reliable, highly available environment.  

If you have a hardware failure in your datacenter on a Saturday night, is someone available to fix it?  How long will it take?  What if it is a complete hardware meltdown?  Maybe it is not your server.  Maybe it is a router or a switch or your firewall. In a cloud environment all of these hardware failures are detected and your application is automatically moved to an unaffected part of the network, often, without you even knowing that a problem existed.

We just had both a router failure and a firewall failure at one of our DNN Corp offices all in the span of a single 24 hour period.  While we were back up and running the next day, it was at least 5 days until we had all of the hardware fully replaced and reconfigured.  I have had this play out in numerous IT shops that I worked in.

When everyone is comparing costs between self-hosting and hosting in the Cloud (or even hosting with a hosting provider like Applied I or CBeyond or PowerDNN), they often forget to include all of the hidden costs.  This includes things like the IT staff needed to keep the servers running.  Maybe it only takes 10 hours a month (testing and installing patches, reviewing server and firewall logs, etc).  That works out to roughly $250/month for an IT person who can cost upwards of $50k/year.  They often don't factor in the extra hardware costs for routers and firewalls or spare equipment or any of the other costs which should all be factored into to self-hosting.

In the end, where is the best place to host your site is very dependent on your specific business needs and capabilities.  Cloud hosting is a very competitive offering for many businesses and once you get past all of the FUD put out by competitors, may be a good solution for you as well.

These are strictly my opinions, but here goes.

Azure's benefits vs self hosting / other hosters

1. Disk space is way cheaper. Ask one of your hosters to give you at 100gb drive and see how much that will cost you. Not to mention you'll have to shutdown the machine to install it (which you don't have to do on Azure)
2. Control of Resources. If you want to spin up a site to test something out or show a client a proof of concept (perhaps performance testing). You have the ability to spin up a beefy server and show them and then shut it down and you only pay for the short time you had it running, not all year long. This can be done in seconds, no tricky billing issues or involving anyone, you have full control.
3. Security. You don't have to open your servers to the public to manage them. You can use Azure's network services to create a VPN from your office to the cloud. You can also use Azure's service bus relay to expose data from your private network to your hosted website without opening ports or logins to your private servers.
4. Bandwidth and Location. You get to pick where your server(s) are located making them much faster for you and your customers. Azure is also on a mega network pipe and is un-throttled. I can transfer over 5MB/sec

The benefits of Appliedi.net or PowerDNN.com is the support team and the hand holding. (I haven't used Windows Azure's support option but it may be just as good). But if all that hand holding and waiting for support response is getting in your way and slowing you down, then I think Azure is a wonderful tool to utilize.

Hi,

After reading this thread I felt I need to share some of my experience working with DNN on Azure. As many of you know, I started to work with DNN and Azure since 2010 what ended in the DNN Azure Accelerator project. I started to work with Azure since CTP in 2008 for other big projects to reduce costs, and we noticed in all the projects we got a minimum of a 50% of TCO reduction, reaching an 85% in some specific and big ones. This is not an ad, I'm talking of real experience and you can found some of that case studies on the network.

A reason because of Windows Azure has not been "ideal" for everybody, is because until June, the platform were more focused for developers than for IT professionals, and normally you had to understand all the "LEGO" pieces to compose your solution, with the pros and cons. This is more well known as PaaS (now Cloud Services on Azure) and is by far were you will find more savings and easy paths to high scalability because is a "fire and forget" way to do the things: you don't have to worry about the maintenance of the OS, you can use tools for auto-scaling, your data is automatically geo-replicated in other 3 datacenters, you can use a managed SQL Azure service, and all the other LEGO pieces like Service Bus, super-cheap storage, virtual networks, etc. As an example, you can change the OS of your DNN webfarm from 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012 (IIS8) in a few minutes by changing a digit in a setting from the control panel. If you do a study of the maintenance costs of all this pieces in an on-premise world you will find that huge TCO reduction because you only concentrate in what you want: your application and your data.

If you are more comfortable with an IaaS model, you lose some managed services (like the automatic OS maintenance) and you will have more control, but remember that more control also means more responsibility. I have preference for the PaaS model but in some scenarios an IaaS model fits better.

Don't forget that since June you can also start to use Windows Azure Websites in a High Density environment for free, that can also be a solution. Here http://david.azurewebsites.net/ you can find a DNN 6.2 installation I did on June to test the shared environment performance (just noticed I have to upgrade to 7.0 that works really faster).

At the end, I recommend you to visit the http://dnnazureaccelerator.codeplex.com/discussions forums where you can find people that have successfully deployed on Azure. I would like share their website links but I prefer to ask them first to do that. BTW would be a good idea to have a show case of these sites, idea that I will be happy to promote.

Hope this helps

We have our own servers and considered migrating to Azure rather than adding more servers. We've found that it's still cheaper (all things considered) to manage and pay for 'more' ourselves than to use Azure. It's not much of a savings, but we also don't have to 'figure' out stuff like backup routines, and what to do about MS updates or restores from a historic image of the dnn install.

The switch still sounds sexy, but i think it makes financial sense for companies that have to calculate IT and licensing at retail, rather than do-it-ourselves.

DISCLAIMER:  I WORK FOR POWERDNN.COM
Hi Arkady,

That's a good question.  A few months ago I had the opportunity to have a very frank conversation with one of Azure's MVPs and I learned some very interesting information about the problems that Microsoft is having with Azure.  Here's some info that might be useful to you:

1) Microsoft went around the world a built a lot of really big, expensive datacenters.
2) Microsoft stuffed these datacenters with a bunch of very expensive servers - two years ago.
3) Nobody is using Azure.
4) Microsoft has a bunch of 2+ year old servers that are sitting in expensive datacenters collecting dust.
5) Microsoft needs to show a return on Azure so they are marketing hard to developers - "Run on Azure, it is cloud and it is cool." (I was told MS is loosing over $1B/yr running Azure)
6) Once you deploy on Azure, you are locked-in and it is all but impossible to move.
7) Azure's cost model starts out small, but gets very expensive very quickly.
8) What everyone calls "Azure" is essentially a public beta of features that are coming in a future release of Windows (Windows Server 2015?).

Regarding tech support, Azure is strictly for tech people.  Their support covers things like your server being down (yes, that happens on Azure) but does not cover things like DNN.

As an interesting note, at DNNWorld DNNCorp announced that they were going to be offering a hosting solution based on Azure.  I also heard a rumor that Microsoft is so desperate for people to use Azure that they actually paid DNNCorp big bucks to make DNN work(and even today there are a good number of issues with running DNN on Azure).