Thanks a lot for all that information. There's so much more to think about than I originally thought of as well as AWS as an option.

On the Microsoft side, if I wanted to set up an archaeological database which is cloud based and could be accessed by multiple users (all data is stored in the cloud) I wonder if I would be better off with SQL Server 2012/14 or Azure. Then there is also the question of PaaS or IaaS. I'm not sure how Visual Studio works with 2012/14 or Azure.