DISCLAIMER: I WORK FOR POWERDNN.

Hi Geoffrey,
Those are great questions and I'll try to answer them here.

AMAZON:
While there are very large companies that use Amazon, I have spoken to many people, both customers and non-customers, who have or are moving away from Amazon. Amazon's model is all about packing as many people onto a piece of hardware as possible. This works fine for some people who just need a server. It doesn't work fine for people who have more important needs.

AZURE:
Azure is a different beast completely and somewhat interesting. Here's my general take on Azure along with information I've heard from Microsoft employees and Azure MVPs:
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."
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 a preview of features that are coming in a future release of Windows (Windows Server 2015?).

POWERDNN:
PowerDNN is also different. We're not a hosting provider - we're managed DotNetNuke provider. What this means is that we work to take care of everything our customers need related to running DotNetNuke. This is evident in everything we do such as:
1) We run nightly performance optimizations for DotNetNuke on your website.
2) We constantly keep your DotNetNuke website in memory.
3) We take care of DotNetNuke's mail connections for you.
4) We can handle upgrading DotNetNuke for you.
5) We answer your DotNetNuke questions.
6) We teach customers people how to use DotNetNuke.
...and a lot more.


When it is all said and done, we don't want our customer to have to worry about all of the little things that people have to do to make DotNetNuke work - we just want it to work and work really well.