This looks like a very promising service and a real time saver. I just did a trail of WordPress site and I was able to get it up and running within a minute or two and the performance was very good. I'm not sure $19.95 a month is appropriate, but with additional features it may be. Standing Cloud is similar to JumpBox or TurnKey Linux, but there are multiple cloud providers beyond Amazon EC2, but looks even easier to use. The ability to easily backup, restore and move is nice. It would be nice if they offered more information about the different cloud services.

Good review. I have been using Disqus on one of my blogs and have been contemplating using ID on another. I just listened to a WordPress Weekly podcast this past weekend where they interviewed Michael Koeing from ID. ID has recently linked their users profiles with WordPress.com which gives them 12+ million users. I'm not sure how that compares to Disqus, but it as to be a big boost.

Also, ID synchronizes the comments stored on their servers with your WordPress blog, so that the comments are stored in both places so that if the ID servers are down, the comments load from the local WordPress database. If you ever leave ID for some reason, there is nothing to do but deactivate the plugin. Plus, there are a lot more plugins and customization features. ID still does not have the Twitter reactions feature that Disqus has, but I think it might be starting to edge out Disqus in features.