Don't buy into the cloud hype. Buy your own servers and colocate. In less than a year, I've been able to build up a server rack at my colo by purchasing for pennies on the dollar lease-expired top of the line servers: 16 cores minimum & 32 gigs ram minimum, for usually around $100. They are all reliable servers, which I clean up and rack. Today, I offer hosting as a side business with $200 per month providing the equal to what RackSpace's Performance servers offer in triplicate: dev, hosting & staging, with git migration and programmatic file synchronization between them. For the "critical" pieces and parts I've custom designed and built heavy iron servers that are simply not available anywhere. Why be a drop in someone else's cloud when you can easily create your own entire sky?