Learning how to admin a server is a simple enough task for a small-ish company. We set up on Rackspace Cloud in a couple of hours, and we're running just fine.

Learning how to admin a server is a simple enough task for a small-ish company. We set up on Rackspace Cloud in a couple of hours, and we're running just fine. We're lucky in that our core market doesn't give us traffic spikes. If and when we run into scaling problems, we'll have a learning experience but that's the same whether you're on App Engine, Amazon or just a cheap web-host running PHP/cPanel/MySQL for £20/year.