Expert developer on the Microsoft stack, can't decide between GAE or Microsoft stack

_x000D_ _x000D_ I am creating a website with a friend to try and make some money. Basically, we want to let users aggregate data from different social networking site's APIs (FaceBook, Twitter, etc.) and do some cool things with the data. My non-developer friend is sold on the Google App Engine because it costs nothing at first, and then you pay as your traffic/data increases. I am torn. I like being able to bootstrap the business like that and have no startup costs (other than time) but I am worried about learning a whole new "programming world" as Joel Spolsky would put it. I am so comfortable with C#, ASP.NET MVC and SQL Server that I think moving to something like Java or Python on top of BigTable would end up taking about 3x longer to develop (if not more). Can anyone give me some guidance on this? Basically, I am wondering if there is any way I can have the following with the Microsoft stack: Free hosting up to some limit of traffic Ability to scale out at a cost similar to what Google offers with GAE (maybe the hosting service would need to have support for a good scalable persistence solution--like Couch DB?) For #1, I am OK if that means hosting it on my own server for the ALPHA/BETA phases. For #2 I am hoping that there is a good hosting service out there who can put me on shared hosting servers and charge by the traffic. Does that exist? Thanks!