full configs are available on github (and more updated).
There are also a lot of other companies/packages to help you setup faster stacks that are more maintained than what I did. easyEngine or ServerPilot being two examples.
How many hits are you getting per day that isn't great performance? I'm running two WP blogs each on their own $5/mo plan and it's been working great with one notable exception: I would constantly run out of memory on my highest-trafficked site (20 uniques per day) with WP Super Cache turned on. When I uninstalled it, the speed went way up and the out of memory errors disappeared.
https://github.com/kevinohashi/WordPressVPS you can take a look at the loadtest_results folder to see. I tested a lot of different configurations and plugins. The default LAMP stack which DO provides starts to struggle at 10 users. While some configs were doing fine over 1000.
I host 4 Wordpress sites on the $5 plan without a problem. Admittedly they are pretty low traffic, but you did specify starter site. If any of the sites ever start seeing significant traffic I'll probably bump up to a 2 cpu plan and move the database to a separate instance.
None of them are mission critical or have any impact on my income, so I used my server setup as a chance to teach myself how to setup nginx.
The sites were using the bitnami image on the free AWS tier before that. No issues there either.
I am running Wordpress on a $5 plan for my personal website. Also paying $1 extra per month for backups. While requesting for an OS image to install, you can choose to install Wordpress on it from their menu. It is a no-frills simple setup if you want to go the self-hosting route.
I used to run WP on $5 plan but the memory soon runs out (with the recommended swap config). The next tier seems to be working fine for the past few months.
You definitely need to be careful how to configure things, but enabling caching, event MPM + php-fpm, mod_pagespeed, etc. like we do in our Bitnami images helps a lot. The good thing is that it is relatively painless to resize if you need to.
RunAbove 'Sandbox' instances overcommit RAM and provide no SLA. Sure, you can't beat the price, but if I wasn't interested in a SLA then I'd rather pay $10 and get a Kimsufi.
On the other hand, I never had an issue with my OVH 2$ (now 5$) server, and I run an Apache with worpress, an IRC bouncer for a handful of users, a mumble, a teamspeak and a minecraft server on it. Less than 100% CPU and RAM utilization.
OVH isn’t cheap because they don’t deliver the performance you ask for, OVH is cheap because they really don’t provide anything else in the free tier, no backups, no additional IPs, no guarantueed uptime.
full configs are available on github (and more updated).
There are also a lot of other companies/packages to help you setup faster stacks that are more maintained than what I did. easyEngine or ServerPilot being two examples.