[dialtone]

I fail to see how this is related to "forego the benefits of cloud computing"... Does your startup have the resources to manage multiple datacenters by itself (such as one in US and one in EU)? Isn't this a clear benefit of cloud computing (and a pretty big one too)?

[DrStalker]

I should have been clearer - you forgo benefits of cloud computing for the functionality related to having a second cloud installation to failover. Each cloud will have all the benefits, but between them you're needing to come up with a way to synchronize applications and data that isn't just "create a cloud backed relational DB and point all the app servers to it"