I've used both hosting.couch.io and Cloudant. So far I've had the best experience with Cloudant.
hosting.couch.io seems well geared for playing with CouchDB and building pure CouchDB apps. There is clearly a great team behind it but they seemed to be working on and distracted by a whole bunch of other things rather than focusing on making the hosting service brilliant.
Cloudant feels like a more robust service that will scale as usage of my app grows. They also have a great team but appear to be much more focused on delivering the best hosted CouchDB service. They also have a number of funded startups that are dependant on them which gives me more confidence that they are taking the service seriously.
Thanks for the kind words jot. The guys behind couch.io are smart and talented, and they really know their couchdb, but I don't think that hosting is their primary focus (they can correct me if I'm wrong).
The main technical difference between us and couch.io is the distribution (clustering) layer we've built. This allows a single couch database to be spread across multiple servers. It provides true horizontal scalability, not just multi-master replication. A database can expand elastically based on resource and concurrency needs. In our next release we'll be adding the ability to tune robustness via quorum constants (a la Amazon's dynamo) on a per-document basis. That should be coming soon.
hosting.couch.io seems well geared for playing with CouchDB and building pure CouchDB apps. There is clearly a great team behind it but they seemed to be working on and distracted by a whole bunch of other things rather than focusing on making the hosting service brilliant.
Cloudant feels like a more robust service that will scale as usage of my app grows. They also have a great team but appear to be much more focused on delivering the best hosted CouchDB service. They also have a number of funded startups that are dependant on them which gives me more confidence that they are taking the service seriously.