> I've found a medium instance (~$100/mo) handles with ease 100k+ visitors/mo without breaking a sweat. This is not really intended as a direct reply to you, b

> I've found a medium instance (~$100/mo) handles with ease 100k+ visitors/mo without breaking a sweat. This is not really intended as a direct reply to you, but I think that price point illustrates mgkimsals point well: I have a Django-based project with about the same amount of visitors per month on an old rented vserver that costs about 7€($10)/month. Yes, you have to set up nginx once, but as mgkimsal mentioned setting up your project for using AWS is not done without any work either. (And of course the load heavily depends on the type of project, so perhaps my visitors could mean only a fraction of the computational load of the ones in your example.)