title: Recommendations for .NET cloud service provider
body: <p>Apologies for the vague question, I am looking for pointers rather than exact answers. I have an application I am developing in Silverlight which requires some back-end persistent data. I can certainly do this myself using IIS / SQL Server, but I am eager to learn something new!</p>
  
  <p>Are there any suitable, free, cloud services I could use? A bit like Google App Engine, but preferably allowing me to use the .NET stack, e.g. via a WCF connection to my client.</p>
  
  <p>As this is just for learning purposes I don't have many requirements regarding data volumes etc, however, it would be nice if I could run some scheduled services on my data in the cloud, e.g. some statistics calculations every hour.</p>
  
  <p>Any pointers?</p>