Funny to read this. Was my idea as well. I had a Drupal website but then realized it was doing lots of db dynamics to serve not-user-specific pages.

I now have a custom backend which produces new json files every 15 minutes (yes, its a very dynamic website !) and then use grunt / handlebars to produce new 'static' html files.

I think most websites not having user-specific content would be much faster (on cheaper hosting) with a solution like this. Instead of doing lots of calculations for every request (and putting a lot of effort in optimizing that), the calculations are done just once in a while. No expensive hardware needed.