I can't praise Chef by Opscode enough. We had several webservers running with a fresh deployment of our web stack in a matter of ten minutes. We've built several recipes to install the pre-requisites (nginx, php5-fpm, Rails depending on the system role) and then it uses a GitHub deployment key to checkout the stable revision of our applications.
Even before you can afford a part-time DevOps engineer I highly recommend automating your system administration as much as possible. When you say you should script your installation of an application server I recommend doing that with Chef!
This will allow you to quickly bring instances online on about any cloud. HP, AWS, Linode, or your own self-brewed OpenStack cloud. You will still have challenges with your persistent data but it's a lot easier to breathe and act quickly with your persistent data knowing you'll have content servers to access that resource.
edit: I have no affiliation with Opscode - we aren't even a paying customer we use their free server. I am sure Puppet or any system administration tool will get you similar milage.
I use a similar system. With OVH you can set installation templates that partition the OS, set ssh keys, and then run a script. Which for me is a puppet script that sets everything up and deploys the latest version of the site.
OVH have an android app so I can scale to a new server from the push of a button on my phone. :D
Plus they cost peanuts compared to amazon.
I has fall over in other data centres too but OVH makes me the happiest.
Even before you can afford a part-time DevOps engineer I highly recommend automating your system administration as much as possible. When you say you should script your installation of an application server I recommend doing that with Chef!
This will allow you to quickly bring instances online on about any cloud. HP, AWS, Linode, or your own self-brewed OpenStack cloud. You will still have challenges with your persistent data but it's a lot easier to breathe and act quickly with your persistent data knowing you'll have content servers to access that resource.
edit: I have no affiliation with Opscode - we aren't even a paying customer we use their free server. I am sure Puppet or any system administration tool will get you similar milage.