Virtual Private Server - VPS
Install a lightweight web server, software stack, on a lightweight VPS
To test the limits of a WordPress installation over a light resources hardware I tried a common LAMP installation (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) over Ubuntu 10.04 on a VPS that is 128mb RAM, 256mb Burstable RAM, 1 CPU core, 10GB Disk Space, and 500GB on Bandwith.
It was not pretty. Common administration use of WordPress quickly reached the 128mb RAM limit, showing that the configuration above was not an option. Others have bumped into the same.
Fortunately, I found that with replacements such as Debian instead of Ubuntu or Nginx instead of Apache, WordPress can actually work on a lightweight VPS. Even more, there is a script that will take care of installing all that is required. You can see some comparisons of performance and the original post of the script here. However, the scrip I ended using was an updated version from the GitHub repository of the original author.
For the Linux OS I used Debian 6.0 32 bit. The script can install too WordPress, Drupal 6,7 and Magento.
After using this script, the only thing I had to do extra for WordPress to work as usual was to give ownership of the folders wp-content, wp-admin, wp-includes to the web server user.
