Thought I would do a quick blog post to celebrate my move from shared hosting to a VPS server provided by DigitalOcean.

The new server named bradley is only a 512mb droplet but I have done quite a bit of work to get the ram usage below 300mb with a full blown Apache and WordPress setup installed.

I managed this by optimizing Apache, mariadb and php a ton, I spent several hours on each changing various configs and experimenting to find the most ram efficient and best performance wise, I am also using a varnish cache in front of all of that to speed it up.

From the pingdom test server in Sweden I am getting a load time below 1 second :O

That's pretty sweet, from American servers I am getting about 2 seconds which makes sense as the server is located in London and so Sweden is gonna be fastest server to test from.

So this is kind of a followup to my 'is a 128Mb VPS usable' and the result is that a 512mb VPS is a perfect size for Apache and WordPress if your willing to put the effort in to optimizing it.

I also did a stress test on the web server and was able to get 350 users all on the website at one time with no issues and even hit 500 but the CPU usage hit 100% as you would expect with a single core system.

So I can absolutely recommend DigitalOcean for small to medium web servers and I hope bradley will be running for years to come with this website and many others