You could host several WordPress sites on a free tier AWS EC2, too. Where things get a little more complicated is when you're getting real traffic and want to

You could host several WordPress sites on a free tier AWS EC2, too. Where things get a little more complicated is when you're getting real traffic and want to be fault tolerant and redundant. RDS is here because keeping your database on the same server as your web server is not ideal at scale. EFS is here because at some point you want to scale horizontally and it's one method to share underlying code (and perhaps cache). ELB is here because if you have more than one web server, you need a load balancer And as you scale, you could add services. This guide isn't for anyone who can host a tiny site on a tiny instance. You'd do that in AWS the same way you would with Digital Ocean.