...and I have a few questions.

I'm basically working on a MySQL+PHP based webapp. Since I don't have on-demand scaling with VPS, I'm planning to move from VPS to Cloud when I hit the 1000 subscribers barrier.

I'm looking at Windows Azure but I'm ok with other suggestions. So here are my questions:

1. Will it really cost me a kidney?

   Every subscriber needs to download around 4-5MB of static resources each day. Bandwidth is free on the VPS but here I see costs can easily get to $800.00/mo; this makes me very insecure about the whole thing, I mean VPS is just $2,000/yr.

2. Do I need another VM or is PHP included in the Web Sites?

   I have basic sysadmin skills, I think I can handle setting up a PHP install, but will I have to do this? If yes, what other service do I need to setup manually? What about Memcached, MySQL, etc?

3. What security protections does it include?

   For example I have some basic protection included, like directory traversals and executable files upload; I also have CloudFlare on my other websites for DDoS protection; will I need to do the same thing here too, can it even be installed, can I edit my DNS records, etc?

4. How are e-mails, subdomains, add-on domains, parked domains, etc. handled?

   I haven't seen any references to e-mail boxes. On the VPS I simply add them from cPanel ([email protected] / whatever.mysite.com / ...); do I have a similar management interface here?

5. Do I get SSH access?

   Or at least FTP, remote MySQL access and maybe some incremental back-ups or something?

6. Can I see my quotas and advanced traffic info?

I must mention that I really like the idea of the whole "cloud" concept, the added reliability and everything but I really need maybe a parallel to regular hosting or something so I know what to expect.