I think AWS is easy, but you're right in that there are so many features you might know where to look.

I could probably write a tutorial and exercises that will cover all of the requisite things for Windows:

  1) Finding an image (also - what is an image?) 
  2) Launching a new instance from an image 
  3) Connecting to instance using RDP
  4) Basic monitoring
     (on the level of - are the lights blinking?)
  5) Finding and pressing the reset button
  6) Creating a new image, to be used later
  7) Setting up auto update
  8) Configuring the firewall

This will take an hour to read and do the exercises, after each anyone can run their stuff in the cloud. I'm not talking about complex system, but a few web sites and a database is easy enough to set up.

Firewall can be buttoned down to only allow ports 80 and 443 (or just 443) to public, and RDP port to your own IP address. If you're using Microsoft stack, they will keep you fully up to date. You would still have to update your own software, but presumably people can handle that.

The only thing is automated backup - you'd have to write a script for that and schedule a cron (schtasks) job.