That’s still way too much. In my previous job I ran the site on $10 a month dual core cpu. It had decent traffic, live status updates, a live stream during 2 hours of the day, a successful e-commerce shop. The site was getting thousands of visits an hour and I was always surprised at how much bandwidth we would chew. It even survived a could have ddos attacks without issues. I also cached the hell out of it with memcached.
My past two previous projects have been on $5 vps with out issue. Some one really tried to bring one of them down with a ddos but gave up when it didn’t work.
A $5 VPS can take you very far if your project is well optimized.
Our biggest expense isn't cpu/bandwidth, it's data. S3 (that includes snapshots/backups), databases, and memory. So your experience aligns with mine for AWS, even though we spend magnitudes more.
We had a lot of data too, everyday we produced at least two hours of video, it would get encoded to the various formats we needed (broadcast and web), store the archive on our local server (which did a lot of backend tasks as well) and host them on Youtube/Facebook for the audience. We also had a 3rd party partner for the livestream on the site. All of that took a massive load off our web server.
If we had to have all of that on the cloud it would have been a lot more expensive.
I've been doing web dev for at least 15 years now so I kind of grew up with the technologies. The thing that helped me the most was building stuff from scratch in my personal projects to learn what is actually happening behind the scenes and see if there is a better way of doing it.
The problem with frameworks/cms/etc is they are trying to solve everybody's problem but aren't really optimized to solve your specific problem if you have one.
My past two previous projects have been on $5 vps with out issue. Some one really tried to bring one of them down with a ddos but gave up when it didn’t work.
A $5 VPS can take you very far if your project is well optimized.