I also really liked Sam's comments at the end:

> The bottom line is that $10-$80 is perfectly fine for an unmonitored monolithic setup. But once you need to start talking SLAs and need to know this thing will be rock solid and survive random failures… well costs start mounting.

I've run sites that do tens or hundreds of thousands of uniques a week with base-level VPSes like Linode or DO, spending just $10-20/mo on it. But if you require high availability or must meet strict SLAs, you start hitting the Pareto principle pretty hard. You end up needing to pay a lot for that increased certainty, even if you are only squeezing a few more minutes of uptime or flexibility out of it.