@Barrikor
Funny you mentioned Amazon because I was checking their services just now and came here to see if anyone had any experience using them. Seems like it could be a good solution since the database and game files would be in two different servers, and having Amazon take care of the database should probably mean faster query response times. Still the issue with using international servers stands, but the amount of benefits are starting to make it thought to decide if I should or shouldn't alienate part of the target audience in order to provide a better experience for the rest, adding the possibility of compensating the lost players with players from other countries.
But this could be a potentially cheap and effective setup, get a shared or cloud server to have all the game files, and then use Amazon RDS for the database.
And btw I don't plan on having kids anytime soon, and there's no money for vacations, so.. yeah 
Everything I know about Amazon's "EC2" is second-hand, but there's a dozen or so
Red Dwarf people developing MMOs right now who are using EC2 for hosting. They seem to like it, the idea that it'll scale-up as much as needed is a big draw.
