Thanks Davidktw! You have given me a good direction what to look for. I am doing research on it now. Now comparing SiteGround which seems cheap and able to support a Joomla CMS and Magento eCommerce for expansion and seems cheap at 47USD per year (I hope that consider cheap). Separately, some website builder also caught my eyes like Jimdo and Weebly, really user-friendly without coding. Do you recommend to go for Jimdo and Weebly kind of service? They don't seem to emphasize so much on up time, underlying platform but focusing on SEO, mobile ready features which sound attractive. Any possible drawback?
I think ready made platforms always have the drawback of limited customisation and extensibility. Where you get most popular features readily available to you so that your time to market is short, customization will be an issue if you need more than what is available out of the box.
Your own customization using infrastructure hosting environments means you will need more development time and also better staffs with expertise in this area. The value you get out of it is you get the opportunity to make things the way you want it to be. Not easy but possible.
I, myself, don't really have experience using readily available platforms since I enjoy meddling with stuffs myself and I have the technical skill set to make things work. Moreover my objective is unlike yours where it's more business centric, so I suppose I can't be more effective in advising more.
From a solution architect perspective, there is no limitation for you to stick with just one type of hosting. Look at the ready made solution and see if you have options to customise, especially in the area of integrating with external system via RESTful API, availability for you to install plugins or modules or so forth. In this way, you can enjoy the readily available futures, but when you need to extend features, you either redirect the users to other platforms also designed by you, or you need to deploy RESTful API elsewhere and integrate with your existing systems.
There are numerous approach to achieve single platform integration despite they are actually deployed in multiple platforms across the Internet, using SAML or SSO federation, web services or RESTful approaches, reverse proxy concepts and a lot more.
Do some research about it. Feel free to post more question when in doubt
Update:
If you are a developer, knowing how to set up web servers, databases, working with linux systems, you can get quite a bargain working with AWS. No you will not have those fancy nice looking UI panels, but you get flexible plans and possible minimal contract too.
With USD38/mth, you can get 200GB of data transfer in+out, static IP, 160GB of volatile diskspace, 20GB of non-volatile diskspace(5 snapshots at 5% changes daily), 1.7GB of memory, 1 VCPU, almost any linux OS distro you like, network bandwidth should be roughly 100+Mbps, dedicate VPS like hosting, on 1 year reserved hosting. The uptime is at optimistically 99.95%.
If you want high availability at approx the same price range, scale down the machine types to a less powerful system that run at 640MB, no volatile diskspace, only 20GB each, but you get 2 separate servers hosted at different data centres. You also get to have a virtual load-balancer to distribute the load. These smaller instances cannot take in high load, but are stable between 1~2VCPU. 2x such server configuration will incur USD36.37/mth
With AWS, you can have enterprise level solution with very attractive price. One thing I don't like about those shared hosting is they tend to over-provisioned their system. If you want nice looking themes for your Wordpress or Joomla, try
www.yootheme.com.
