[throwaway519]

10 million requests per month for $5 is about 4 requests per second, correct? Which is about 3 orders of magnitude less than nginx serving static html.

As a comparison, that's akin to a person walking 4 km/day vs. flying 4,000 km/day,

It's still not a great comparison as the $5 VPS is already paid for. But to take it as you suggest, I agree it's up to the website owner whether they prefer to have 4km/day workers who can sometimes clone themselves in different parts of the world but only for a limited time until they costmore, or a 4000/day flying suit.

Still a bit apples to oranges.