Checkout AWS's Elastic Beanstalk. Full DevOps built in. I have an app setup to use a new cheap t2.micro server and skips the load balancer (but I can add one at any time). Performance is pretty good and best of all, it only runs me around $13/m.
If AWS lowers the pricing of the entry level EC2 instances that Elastic Beanstalk uses a bit more, I plan on moving all my side projects as it just doesn't make any sense to manage any servers or pay $20/app when I get more flexibility with AWS (ssh to find logs, tight integration between AWS services, etc). The other thing I wish they had was the ability to use a EC2 instance for more than 1 application as we don't really need 4 separate apps, but it's just mostly for cost reasons as a bootstrapped startup.
One thing we don't use, but want to down the road is using AWS CloudSearch unfortunately and currently just use a file based search, but if they lower the entry level pricing (currently more than our entire AWS spend) or we can afford it we plan on using them to manage search.
It certainly is unfortunate that CloudSearch doesn't scale down smaller, I had to skip it for the same reason.