From my tests with couch, the view isn't populated immediately after a document has been inserted, and may take some time. I think I tried this doing insert bulk, wait for view, insert 1, query, but I'd have to double check.
Cloudant (based on CouchDB) automatically triggers map-reduce and auto-compacts your database for you. This is my second post about Cloudant - note that I am employed by Cloudant. :)
Make it a product, and I'd be more interested. A number of companies have their own hosting, so the hosting part is not only unneeded, but is also usually a non starter.
