Trying to figure out high bandwidth hosting

I am more of a web dev than a sys admin and I am trying to figure out hosting for a project.

I am planning to accommodate about 1.8 million pageviews and ~250 GB bandwidth out in a single day, followed by very low levels of traffic.

I would like to make this website in php with some kind of database backend, it could be simple like amazon simpleDB or a relational db, I don't care.

I do not want to have to concern myself with scaling/load balancing/backing up data/crashes/spinning up servers. I want to write it in php, click go, and not have to worry about sys admin issues. I am fine using apis or custom libraries or w/e. However I would like it to be somewhat portable so I am not stuck with a single hosting solution.

I would like this to cost ~$150 or less, but if a solution was good enough I'd be willing to pay a bit more.

I have been looking at a lot of hosting solutions, amazon seems to want you to be a sys admin, google locks you in and forces you to use python. I have only looked at rackspace a little bit, but it seemed rather complex as well.

Edit: The reason I was hoping to do around $150 is because of this post about someone doing a similar traffic load with google app engine for like $80: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-app-engine-served-humble-indie.html