[trevelyan]

I'm more curious what VPS package you had powering your stuff at Linode and how much you were spending on it each month? Reason being that 250 USD buys a LOT of server these days and it is surprising you ended up with underpowered hardware if your VPS wasn't giving you any problems.

If you're looking to upgrade in the future, you might be much better off throwing a dedicated server at the problem and setting a nightly backup to S3. Also, thank you for posting.

[jacques_chester]

I use 2 512Mb Linodes. One for nginx/PHP, one for MySQL. Putting these on different servers is by far the biggest leap in performance I ever got.

Monthly cost is about $40 ... unless you count my time.