As a developer who's never been entirely comfortable with the hardware end of things, it seems like there is a tremendous opportunity here. I would pay a lot for set it and forget it hosting, where if you get TechCrunched or HNed the only consequence would be a spike in the amount of your bill.<p>It seems like this would be a very difficult problem to solve - kind of like Dropbox getting their service to work seamlessly on every device and OS - but doable, and very lucrative for whoever gets there first.
Whenever anyone asks me about autoscaling, I always point out that making the autoscaling rules is more art than science. There is a lot of trial and error, but in the end you have to kind of go with your gut on what the business needs.
i really like the google docs as a reporting/monitoring outlet idea, it's not the gist of what your article is about, but i usually always had my own reporting wired up, seems like an interesting thought to use google docs for that. is that a common thing, do people do their reporting through google docs? going to try this out.