let me rephrase, "I can spend a fair amount of time doing things myself, or I can pay a bit more and not have to do those things".
Depending on who you are, and what you're doing, you may value your time more than a small amount of money. Or, you may value that amount of money more than your time. Neither is right or wrong.
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
After that installing a firebird database can be easy if i choose ubuntu instance
Next you can add nginx/django just for fun For backup there are many python scripts to backup to s3/ebs snapshots