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.