I would consider a slight change in your pricing stragedy. Charge both a one time setup fee and a monthly maintenace charge based on storage and activity. Basically pass "it through" with a markup to pay for your expertise to maintain the account.

You might setup a 2 tier system. For customers who want "permanent" storage of small to moderate sized files you could have a dedicated server with off-site backup. For customers who need larger storage set them up in the cloud as previously discussed.

When I last looked Amazon was charging for storage but not band-width/usage. That is apparently scheduled to go away, sometime.

HTH,

Tom

A key consideration is the benefits the cloud will bring to you and can your application make the most of them ?

One of these is Multitenancy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitenancy and many who have moved simply appliance of software based solutions to the cloud have found the lack of being able to multitenant their existing architecture has hindered them. For example moving a solution to the cloud should enable you to extend your reach of provision to more clients more cost effectively. However if in doing so you need to have a seperate installation of your software for each client used in the cloud it suddenly becomes costly and prohibitive to the users adoption.

Imagine your software is normally £20,000 to setup as an installation for a client due to the hardware and setup required so this is your entry level. Moving to the cloud you still need to do this for each seperate client and cannot share the resources unless you can multitenant. So a small user still has to pay £20,000+ to acquire the access to this solution due to your costs. If you can multitenant then this one cost installation could be shared amongst many small clients until the capacity was reached, ensuring security and confidentiality for each client and that they could afford a time/user slice of the actual cost and thus you could sell your wares to customers that normally could not afford the required entry level installation.

This is a key mistake many on network providers have made when launching a cloud service by simply moving on network sellable solutions to them installing it in a datacentre. There is more to it that simply locating the same architetcture ina different location than customer site.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiten...

Virtualization is definitely the future and is at the center of every organization's money-saving initiative. By reducing the numbers and types of servers that support business applications, companies are engaging in numerous significant benefits.

Have you had a chance to check out Atum? www.atum.com They offer free trials for you to see if this really fits your business needs and give it a test run so check them out! The packages include trusty IBM server hardware, tier 4 data center, 2 TB bandwidth, and more. take a look at packages starting from $39/mo.

What's stopping you to virtualizating your web applications? If you don't know what to do with your physical hardware, Atum also offers that they buy it from you to save you the hassle.

Good luck!

Source: www.atum.com

Without exact knowledge of your solution and with what you provide I would suggest option 2 seems a good option.

Users are used to having the option for a free basic service with limits and an optional paid for premium. Hotmail does just that as do a wide number of online sites that give value to a point and then if you want more you opt to pay. Linked in has a free membership but want to do extra things and you choose to upgrade and pay a monthly fee.

Users are already familiar with this model so why break a model that works.