ns9,
Sorry, I can’t help you with the cloud part of your question but, as a sysadmin, you must know that WP (as well as all the other CMS “solutions”) require a great deal of CPU time, more RAM than usually allotted in a shared account (and some VPS accounts) so, if you’re not using a dedi, big VPS or cloud, I’d recommend that you consider “Specialized Hosting” (like WebHostingBuzz has). It’ll save you a lot of headaches.
Regards,
DK