Hi,
Rosie (12 weeks old) has been with us for four weeks now. After some soul-searching and some advice from the lovely people on this forum, we decided to crate her downstairs from the very beginning. We halved her crate with cardboard boxes, so that it was just big enough for her (too big and they use one end of it as a toilet), I covered it with an old towel at night to make sure she knew the difference between night and day (probably overkill! I think she can tell without that!).
She howled for a really short time the first night. But I made the mistake of setting my alarm clock for 3am, so I could take her out for a wee. When I put her back in the crate, she howled for about an hour! The next night, she howled immediately for about 45 minutes (we knew from experience with our kids that if you give in, it just teaches them to howl for 45 minutes every night because then you will come down - so we just lay upstairs listening until she stopped!) but then she slept through till the morning. I went down to her when she cried again in the morning, but made sure I didn't acknowledge her until she'd been quiet for a few minutes, so I wasn't rewarding her for crying.
The crying got less and less and she hasn't cried for ages now, except for when she can hear us moving about upstairs in the morning - I think she thinks she's missing out on something then.
I think you'll find your own way, but try not to get into patterns that you won't be able to cope with long term -we knew we didn't want her upstairs in our house, which was why we made the decision not to bring her upstairs as a puppy. Apart from that, do what feels right, I guess. Some people comfort the puppies for the first few nights - my husband and I are veterans of the sleep war - we have two kids under 4 - so we were able to ignore the crying without too much trauma!
Good luck - let us know how it goes.