I just read through the T's and C's for vBulliten's cloud offering, and I'm not sure I would want to know our management had given over as much authority to them as they are asking for. I'm sure there are other solutions, I've only read the vBulliten one so far. Honestly, I don't hate SMF. It's easy to use, easy to manage, easily customizable, has a pretty robust community on the dev side. We should be doing better with best practices like keeping up on security updates and minimizing spam in a more automated fashion, but that's not SMF's fault. And I'm fairly certain we could work with the current host or a new host to have better guarantees around static IP addresses for the site and database.