I tried out Umbraco’s new Cloud service. It’s an interesting delivery mechanism, and I can see the potential in it. The starter package is only ~$28 a month (25 Euro), and that gets you everything you need to host your site. You still need to buy a domain name and an SSL cert (SSL is optional, but I wouldn’t run anything but a static HTML site without SSL), but it’s a matter of minutes from signing up to a functional Umbraco installation. This price includes Umbraco Forms, as well as a subscription to Umbraco TV. This is pretty good value.

This is clearly a brand-new delivery mechanism for Umbraco and there are a few issues that are probably down to initial glitches. You pay up front for one month, but if you cancel, refunds aren’t prorated automatically. Also, it’s really easy to accidentally cancel - you’d think that you could delete a project and create a new one, but nope, deleting the project kills everything.

However, Umbraco Support is really good at helping get through all this. If you have issues, just reach out to support and they will help. I got the distinct feeling that the company really wants to make customers happy - and I just paid $28, not hundreds more. Even though I didn’t end up using the service, I feel confident in recommending you try it out to see whether it meets your needs.

I wanted to get some quick thoughts down, and may write a longer review later.