I wrote an article here, and the traffic I got was 1.3 million web requests. All I did was use memcache, and have all my static assets served with nginx.

Just like the article implies, if it requires any tweaking and configuration, most people won't/can't do it.

Yeah my bad; my site is mostly just for my personal use and I didn't really optimize for views lol. I'm seeing about 200 views/minute.

You may want to look at sticking it behind Cloudflare, since their basic CDN service is free.

Just exporting it to static HTML would work or some some of cache. Maybe varnish or even a reverse proxy with caching.

If he exported to static html, he could just put the static contents on S3 and configure the bucket to be accessible via https.

Or CloudFront. He's on AWS, and it's nearly free (<.05 cents for most personal websites)

Indeed can’t read. Getting 500 Server error.