Just wanted to share something I just found and think others can benefit from. Recently signed up for the free trial of Windows Azure and played around with it for a bit. http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/ They have a pretty generous 3 month trial that is more than enough to run some simple stuff in their virtual machine and lots of other things I understand 10% off.... 70gb storage, unlimited inbound, 25gb outbound, 10 websites, SQL server etc. It is pretty pricey for the paid options though so I think the value is in the free trial so keep that in mind if you develop something there. As I understand it you cant be charged for anything unless you specifically allow them but if you need more allowance in some area you will be able to purchases that. You will need a credit card & mobile phone number (sms verification) for the signup.
An update and clarification since I was a bit confused for a while. It includes 750 'compute hours' per month which covers a month usage since a month is max 744 hours. This is if you chose the 1 core option. If you select the 2 core option you will get half that, half again for 4 cores etc. This whole hours thing is a bit confusing and the whole thing is meant for people who know their stuff but free is free and I wanted to try it out and have been impressed so far with it. But as I said before its pretty pricey for regular use and definitely aimed at businesses.
I've got some experience with Windows Azure for the past 3 months as well. My trial just expired the other day. At first I felt it was a great service, but when I started to dig deeper i was somewhat disappointed. First, yes, it appeared to be quite pricey. Second, I didn't like the fact that PING is blocked network wide for all Azure servers. Third, it's impossible to get a static IP and reassign it to other servers if required. An IP is assigned to one instance and will change if you stop the server or delete it.