"We are about 1600 students, so in the best of the worlds I will be handling 1000+ requests per second" The chances of 1000 students all making a request to th

"We are about 1600 students, so in the best of the worlds I will be handling 1000+ requests per second" The chances of 1000 students all making a request to the site at the exact same moment are very low. You'll probably be fine with a small VPS from Linode or similar.