Provisioning and maintenance of infrastructure for Web based digital library search engines such as CiteSeerX present several challenges. CiteSeerX provides autonomous citation indexing, full text indexing, and extensive document metadata from documents crawled from the Web across computer and information sciences and related fields. Infrastructure virtualization and cloud computing are particularly attractive choices for CiteSeerX, which is challenges by both growth in the size of the indexed document collection, new features and most prominently usage. In this paper, we discuss constraints and choices faced by information retrieval systems like CiteSeerX by exploring in detail aspects of placing CiteSeerX into current cloud infrastructure offerings. We also implement an ad-hoc virtualized storage system for experimenting with adoption of cloud infrastructure serviecs. Our results show that a cloud implementation of CiteSeerX may be a feasible alternative for its continued operation and growth.