If he lives near Los Angeles, UCode (www.ucode.com) teaches kids how to program through worksheets and exercises. Sounds ideally suited for him. The Ruby programming language is used. Ruby is an excellent choice for an 11 year old, easy to get started and serious enough to do amazing production applications (particularly for the web). There are some great tutorials online including tools to try ruby code (tryruby.org and 19pad.charlie.bz). Code School has a free short course using tryruby: http://www.codeschool.com/courses/try-ruby.

This is not a "cloud" problem. This is a virtual server and image problem. Clouds have nothing to do with virtual servers. If you use a service like NewServers.com, you can get dedicated physical servers for your cloud, on-demand and at hourly prices.

USENET was always a very poor system. It's amazing anybody ever used it. You only receive some of the posts and you never know if your posts are really posted and who sees them. It was always a TREMENDOUSLY flawed system that has no place in even YESTERDAY's internet world. Let alone today's. When has the last time anybody used USENET for anything remotely serious or even interesting?