I have a website that receives heavy seasonal traffic. For much of the year, typical shared web hosting is adequate; however, the process of upgrading to VPS or dedicated hosting (when traffic gets too heavy) is quite arduous with my current host.
I'm looking at cloud hosting options like Rackspace and AWS, but I'm confused about how this works.
I'm used to administering my sites via cPanel, and I have my GMail configured to point to my web server and fetch mail. Sometimes, I require MySQL databases.
I would like all these features, plus easy (or automatic) scalability. Additionally, I don't want to pay $150/mo.
Is there a solution? Is cloud hosting the solution? How do I transition from a cPanel environment to a cloud hosting environment?