The only possible answer here is "it depends". As SQLite themselves state, they're running a 500K hits/day site on SQLite just fine. They also point out that t

The only possible answer here is "it depends". As SQLite themselves state, they're running a 500K hits/day site on SQLite just fine. They also point out that their site is not particularly write heavy, which is a somewhat important point to be making with SQLite specifically. What do Django mean by a "real project"? If this is a project you intend to scale to beyond the scope of SQLite, then starting from something that will scale that way in the first place will alleviate later growing pains. If it's your personal site and will always and forever be run on a VPS with 1GB of RAM? There's no reason not to just stick with SQLite -- and you get the benefits of not having to maintain a "real" db service.