Sir,
I've graduated in computing back a few years ago and been working at an ISP whee I hold a sysadmin position.
As I need more money - I am back on this website.
I have been usinf Linux for 7 years, Ubuntu/Debian being my favorite distribution.
I have skills in BASH, Python, C, and other programming languages.
My daily work is to set up and maintain servers, of all types: high availability (nginx, php-fpm, backuppc, xen, load balancing), backups, security, mail servers, setup of various things..
Please come and chat with me.
As much as I love amazon, people who bid on that and tell you they can provide you an extact quote are liers.
I have been using AWS for 2 years and heve seen it evolving.
Factors like the size of the images your website/server will send, if they're compressed, using X algorithm can gjve completly different benchmarks than not compressed or compressed using a faster data processing algorithm.
Same goes for the PHP code, if it's well written, time of execution can vary. So there might be things to do to your code that could reduce the montly costs.
FInally, people could do things like download the biggest file over and over on your server so you get a $2k bill of bandwidth (happened to me with a 100mb file downloaded thousands of time) you need to protect youself against this as Amazon won't fix and won't refund. They make their money on people'w mistakes.
I usually work on weekends so it'd be nice to begin soon :)
Regards;