Cloud Servers - My journey

I was asked to evaluate the option of having severs on the cloud. This was essentially to move our Business Intelligence solutions, offered as Services to the cloud. We did this to take advantage of the scalability of the cloud infrastructure. I started off with the Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Web Hosting and Hosted Cloud System Infrastructure Services (On Demand), 2009.Had a cursory look at some and a detailed look at a few of the providers featured in the quadrant. Apart from these companies, had a look at ElasticHosts, RedPlaid, FlexiScal. There is a lot of confusion in the usage of the term "Cloud servers"/"On Demand Servers" etc. Also the pricing plans are not uniform for a straight grid comparison. Some providers charges are based on RAM usage, some charge by the configuration, some offer prepaid, postpaid plans, and the price varies with all different offerings. Found out that some have live person chat in their website, which kind of helped in getting clarifications. Finally i settled on GoGrid which offered
1. A free trial period ($100 worth credit)
2. A very good demo of their cloud servers
3. Persistent storage
4. Ability to create a image of my configured server (havent' tried how good this works!!!)
5. A static IP
6. Live Support
7. An easy to use interface

In my first week of trial, i am really impressed with the performance and the support. I had configured a Windows 2003 Enterprise with 2G memory which came with 60GB storage, on top of this my server has SQL Express, IIS and ASP.net. I like the feature of storage which can be configured separately, where we can move the image and any backups, so that if we were to start fresh we can start from where we left.