I have created a very basic Django application which puts an email to the database (Coming soon page for a startup). I launched a t1.micro instance to try out which load it can carry out. Nginx+FastCGI from Django+sqllite/postgres - tried both. blitz.io test gave me a pretty unhappy result (just 100 users within 1 minute): This rush generated 542 successful hits in 1.0 min and we transferred 809.01 KB of data in and out of your app. The average hit rate of 8.81/second translates to about 761,612 hits/day. You got bigger problems though: 87.28% of the users during this rush experienced timeouts or errors! I tried both to put varnish, disabled Debub mode in django and started fastcgi in threaded mode - nothing helps. This is not gonna be a super highload page - just a coming soon page to save email of subscribers, it should carry at least 500-1000 users at the same time in peak... I believe t1.micro is super small for that, but I also have tried small instance - not better result.. Please let me know should I use something different from Amazon EC2, or to pick smth better than t1.micro, or I that is definetely a configuration issues?...