Need advice on choosing the right stack for a high traffic hits tracking application

I m working on scaling a legacy web application which is basically a small time e-commerce store listing products.

They had a simple web metrics platform built on PHP/MySQL which would show them hits each product gets. Every time a user visits a product page, a hit is recorded in the database, essentially a pageview.

Now they are much bigger and have a lot of traffic and the existing metrics system just cant handle the load and brings the site itself down. So I have disabled the hits tracking for now. Google Analytics is not a solution because we need the hits data in-house.

My plan is move the hits tracking feature to a cloud based solution like Amazon AWS.

Data to be tracked is Simple - SKU and Hits

The data should still get stored in a MySQL database eventually for reporting and analysis.

Can a PHP/MySQL combination sitting on a cloud like Amazon AWS or Digital Ocean handle the load about 500K hits a day ? What kind of hardware config would that need ?

What web server or technology can handle the load and pass the data on to MySQL database ?

We don't need real time data but at least by end of day for the current day. So could the data be queued in some noSQL DB like redis or mongoDB and then do a delayed write to MySQL ?

Also the solution should be cost-effective as I don't have a big budget for this .