That's not true in the slightest, unless that "small web company" is using App Engine. Microsoft has a hardon for dev-managed directly-addressed OS instances r

That's not true in the slightest, unless that "small web company" is using App Engine. Microsoft has a hardon for dev-managed directly-addressed OS instances running on x86 machines, so you could at the very least migrate to their extant hosting infrastructure. Even if you have to rewrite your app in C# + SQL Server, it's still going to be a direct gloss for most traditional webapps. Google does no such thing -- everything is massively distributed at every level, where blocks of infrastructure are managed as ideal services independently from any application, and addressed at the datacenter level. You are not going to get to manage your own machines, access a traditional filesystem, use relational databases, a direct socket to the client, direct access to internet hosts, basically anything you take for granted.