almost a year later ........
I have signed up for several servers, vps, etc. Shared Hosting, Linux Vpses, Forget it!!
For me it is a no brainer, I haven't got the experience necessary for editing command line for server, I tested out the control panel and fantastico, softaculous in order to enable me to have less "hazzles" when editing and building web pages and applications. It ended up in disaster. I have some years experience of running an online business in the early 2000's oscommerce and remember the hazzles from back then, it hasn't got any better really in that sense the cloud is a gift for us people who just want to launch a site, forum, application and start building contents and not sit and milk around with settings and headaches. Also Servers like VPS seem slow in configuring the settings, adding modules etc. Hours of waste and ball scratching.
I just decided to stick to the cloud, that is my only chance i think, i use Openshift cloud "well it is just like a cloud for me" with three free gears, Openshift seems endless for possibilities, development and linking to other cloud providers like Amazon S3 for storage etc.
I am also testing the Amazon EC2, google engine and Microsoft cloud or Vuze. I find Amazon easiest of them all, I think the google engine is surprisingly complicated as it relies on many commands and specific setups, Not a walk in the park. Microsofts cloud seems ok but is a bad boy, seems like the master of Cloud, almost feels like flashy and like google chrome somehow! Lol
But when it comes down to the argument some people/users say that there should be dedicated servers, i think they simply have the now how, and can utilize the resources of the server much more efficient, the cloud can also be a bit tricky to tune in for maximum performance for money spent! For me the extra dollars for the cloud if any is well spent money for my saved time.
Still I think the free Open shift with 3 gears covers 50 000 visitors per month, that is more than enough.
They also have a developer community and nice support, you can start out by building your own github, I can recommend that for understanding more of the concept and explore from there.
They also have silver account 20 USD per month, with 16 gears "small" or "medium", ssl, and some other things, but after 3 free small gears you end up paying per hour for usage, i am thinking about trying that out as soon as my free gears starts generating some sort of income. Seems so easy to just add some gears when needed, they also got a load balancing etc. Etc.
In counts of number of wordpress sites with domain, you could probably run 6 or more it depends,for free with openshift, every gear has 512 mb ram.
Just a thought.
Good luck with choosing
