title: Should I choose cloud?
body: <p>I'm about to start development on a project with very uncertain load/traffic specifics. When it will be released there will certainly be very low load that can easily be handled by a single desktop quad code machine.</p>
  
  <p>The problem is that there will be (after some invite-only period) a strong publicity for the product so I expect considerable traffic/load peaks.</p>
  
  <p>I haven't read enough about cloud providers and I'm mostly leaning toward Amazon or Azure for the credibility these two companies have without checking them out as I should with others (ie. Rackspace that I suppose is also a cloud service provider).</p>
  
  <h2>What I want</h2>
  
  <p>I would like to create a normal Asp.net MVC web application that can be run on in-house single machine low-cost server. It would run web server along with database (relational and maybe also document) <strong>and fulltext search</strong> (not SQL FTS but rather high speed separate product like Lucene or Sphinx). But after initial invite-only period I'd like to move this app to the cloud to make it more traffic/load demand-friendly.</p>
  
  <p>As much as I know Amazon offers a sort of virtual machine hosting which I understand you setup as a normal server but has possible flexible resources in terms of load power. I'm not sure if that can be accomplished on Azure as well.</p>
  
  <h2>Questions</h2>
  
  <ol>
  <li>What is your experience with application transition to cloud and which one did you choose and why?</li>
  <li>What would you recommend I should think about when designing/developing the solution to make the transition as painless as possible.</li>
  <li>Based on your experience is it better to move to the cloud (financial wise) or is it better to buy your own servers and load balance application yourself and maybe save money on the long run?</li>
  </ol>