RocketCloud

The US Government cannot just "take" information from EU companies unless they are US based or a US subsidiary... whether this is legal or otherwise.

Being in the EU gives us strong privacy and security laws and they seem to be about to get tougher in light of recent events from the NSA.

There is also the perception element: The US Government cannot be trusted with data from non-US companies or citizens... this is what some of our clients have said to us and I have also read dozens of articles with hosting providers being asked the same questions from their clients.

This will run and run and I believe that, for the EU at least, US cloud providers will not be considered for future projects.

I am not sure how big this issue is in the US but in Europe it is massive and will not go away any time soon :(

Our prices reflect what we are able to achieve at this time without economies of scale: Once we scale up, these prices will inevitably will come down.

I should qualify that statement as it sounds a bit "final"... I mean that we want to release as few features as we can that still provide value at the start, then we perfect them before adding more as time goes on and as demand rises.

I think Jason Fried said something along the lines of "it's better to release a well done half than a half-assed whole"

That sounds a bit better :)

Probably RAID 1 (or manufacturer equivalent) for the VMs.

We haven't bought the hardware yet although we have a shortlist so I can't give you any specifics at this time :(

Backups won't be online from day one I don't think but it is something we will be looking at soon after.

Power/Bandwidth is a strange beast in the UK: Up north, power is cheap and bandwidth is expensive but it is the other way round the further south you go! (anecdotal evidence but it's broadly true)

We are looking at up to 16GB at the moment but we are not ruling out bigger VMs

We will be based on Hyper-V 2012.

More details will be forthcoming as we get nearer the launch date.

Not at this time but we want to start simple.

I would rather we perfected the simple stuff then added the things that increased value and that people are actually wanting.