Jono, my company, qbox.io is a provider of hosted Elasticsearch with deployments on any data center in the AWS, Rackspace, and Softlayer public clouds. You could think of us as a MongoHQ for Elasticsearch.

Yes, it will be more expensive than the infrastructure by itself, but it will also come with fast and easy Elasticsearch deployment, scaling, and support from some of the best in the business. I love Linode and AWS, but they will not know how to help you with application-specific questions.

Haters, commence hating