I moved my business onto cloud servers after collocating with my own hardware servers (from 1996 - 2012). I found it attractive to have several hardware servers sharing the load of the virtual server so that if a hardware server went down, the site would stay up. I also liked not having to screw with hardware updates or worry about hardware reliability. Yes, our site has gone down a couple of times, but mostly it's been routers that have gone down. We've never lost any data.

One good thing (for me) was that I could move up or down in server performance without buying hardware. It is easy for the ISP to simply take an image of the site and move it to a more capable server if I want it.

One of the deciding factors for me was how much an ISP was willing to help if we had problems. Some just say that their server will work, anything else is up to you. Others have in-house expertise so if there's an issue that we can't solve, they can jump in and help.

I use WSFTP-Pro to set up synchronization tasks. Regularly, it synchronizes the html/jsp/etc. files with copies on our office computers but also downloads regular copies of the SQL databases so we have backups both on the server as well as in our office, off site.

I spend a great deal of my life talking to large corporations about how to build scalable data centers.

My primary focus is on the infrastructure for moving packets into, out of and within the data center. When things become large building it right is like getting a city's street and transit layout right. Traffic has to be managed so that in the event of failures or unexpected large data moves the infrastructure can handle it in a way that hopefully doesn't impact performance.

I think you're operation is considerably smaller than what I'm talking about but doing the right planning up front and making sure you understand your requirements up front will really go a long way to make sure that the choices you make serve you well in the future. These sorts of things follow the same principals of building a fast car. You're options are:

1) Cheap
2) Fast
3) Reliable

Pick 2.

Also, bear in mind that there are two types of clouds - there is the public cloud like Amazon and other providers but there is also the private cloud. Maybe that's an option for you if you understand what it would mean.

For the private cloud you would instead of having a physical server running each instance of the thing you are doing. Like a physical SQL server, physical for the BBS and whatever other servers you run today. Those can be consolidated into a virtual environment by you. It isn't that hard to run VMWare ESXi (Or Hyper-V or KVM depending on the hypervisor you like) on a couple of servers and then build your virtual servers there. Once you do that you basically have your own private cloud. You can consolidate the number of physical servers you have into a few with the resources you need for the Virtual Servers you plan to run.

I don't know how much Amazon costs on a month to month basis for what you're trying to do but one of the benefits to AWS is that it is easy to order more capacity for an upcoming need and then when that need passes you can scale back down to your normal footprint. If you don't expect to have that need though then it becomes something you're paying for but not using.

AWS tends to look attractive up front because it can be inexpensive but as companies scale into it and leverage it more and more it actually can become more expensive to run than your own private cloud.

With your own private cloud you would just need to factor in those costs to build it and then the depreciation over whatever term your business uses.

So, my next question would be how many servers does the operation run on? If it is just a few and they are older as you have mentioned updating your hardware to run on some newer 64-bit, multi-core Intel processors from any vendor you like (or mine :D) would fill a huge amount of your need.

Compare the cost of AWS over time vs the cost of building your own built with today's technology. You can build your own cloud, it's not that hard and then if you're happy with the way you have been managing it you can keep doing it like that.

I run a lab server at home which is basically a Shuttle desktop box with an i7 Intel processor, 32GB of RAM and two 1TB drives. I run an AD server on it as well as 8 other virtual machines for various test environments I have. They range from Linux servers to virtual appliances from what my company does. Granted it's a lab environment but still it holds value in 'how much did it cost me to build this?' It was around $800. Would I run my business on it? No, but that's just it - servers are cheap.

Visualization is cheap and it's easy.

Once you can grasp what a cloud actually is and how you would build it for your environment it really becomes an 'ah-ha!' moment.

Also, with a private cloud you can protect the data more (or less if you suck at that).