What features did you want for your personal site that lead to choosing Django (or a backend framework at all) instead of a static site generator?
If you're running a server anyway, it seems trivial to serve content dynamically generated from markdown - all an SSG pipeline adds is more dependencies and stuff to break.
I know there's a fair few big nerd blogs powered by static sites, but when you really consider the full stack and frequency of work that's being done or the number of 3rd party external services they're having to depend on, they'd have been better by many metrics if the nerds had just written themselves a custom backend from the start.
It could easily have been a static website, but I happened to stumble across PWS, which came bundled with a default ASP website. That is how I got started. I replaced the default index.asp with my own and began building from there. A nice bonus of this approach was that the default website included a server-side guestbook application that stored comments in an MS Access database. Reading through its source code taught me server-side scripting. I used that newfound knowledge to write my own server-side applications.
Of course, this was a long time ago. That website still exists but today most of it is just a collection of static HTML files generated by a Common Lisp program I wrote for myself. The only parts that are not static are the guestbook and comment forms, which are implemented in CL using Hunchentoot.
I probably wouldn't be able to handle 0.5M requests, but I am nowhere near getting them. If I start approaching such numbers I'll consider an upgrade.
Check out Wagtail if you'd like to have even more batteries included for your site, it was a delight building my site with it:
I'd still recommend starting with SQLite, seems that by skipping a DB service you can save quite a few bucks.