suggestions for VPS research projects

I'm an IT student. I'm interested in virtual private servers and I want to make a research project with the technology.

I had an idea of making a simple web host that caters student's web applications. But my problem is how do I defend it when asked about the advantages of my web host compared to other free web hosting sites.

Also, I think making a web host is quite a big task.

So could anybody give me some research topic suggestions on anything that concerns VPSes? or anything about cloud technology in general.

thanks!