SQL Server 2012 High Availability options

I'd encourage you to look at Stardard edition - it runs about $1700/core retail and it supports a two-node failover cluster instance (FCI), which addresses your HA within the same data center (Web edition doesn't support failover clustering). An FCI includes two physical servers, with shared storage between them (your SAN, presumably), and one server is ready to take over for the other in case of a failure, usually with around 30 seconds of downtime.

You're correct that AlwaysOn would work well in the situation you're describing with DR at a separate data center, but since it's an Enterprise feature, you're looking at going from $1700/core to $7800, and likely isn't worth it for you. That said, standard edition still supports all forms of replication, so you can set up either log shipping or maybe transactional replication to your DR site from your primary servers. That way, your remote server is ready to take over once you redirect your application tier.

From a licensing perspective, you may not even need to license the remote site - as long as you're not running reporting from the DR server and no clients are connecting, I don't believe it has to be licensed. However, you'll want to confirm that with a license specialist (I'm not one), as the licensing for HA, DR, and warm failovers is very nuanced, where some implementations require licensing and some do not. If we were to license the second site, you now have the option of running reporting from the replicated server, which would alleviate some load on your primary servers (if that's an issue).

I hope that answers your questions, and if you need some more detail, please elaborate and I'll fill in where I can.

thanks @ryanmccauley, i'm actually looking to avoid shared storage, which i believe always on solves, but it's damn expensive... we are looking at SPLA licensing and it's literally around 10x the price of web edition.