While Cloud SQL and Appengine both do look expensive, I have to say the new integration is quite nice to work with. I had struggled in the past with djangoappengine, which let Django run on the weirdness of the Appengine Datastore, but now that I'm running basically "pure" Django on MySQL it's far smoother sailing. Much less setup than AWS and even easier/more straightforward than doing Django on Heroku in my opinion, but ymmv.