I believe they were planning to expand the number of countries they operate in. The US also has terrible credit card systems compared to any other developed nation.
I think its going to be a big mess and the domain registrars are going to make boatloads of money. I don't want to imagine the number of phishing sites that are going to be made.
If you think your going to need servers down the road on AWS I would look into reserving a bunch of servers on three year terms for medium usage. Pay upfront using your credit and save money later on down the road.
I am planning on adding some estimate. It really depends on the size of the image but it roughly takes 10 minutes. I believe to add an estimate you need two scripts running because of how dd works.