Virtual Private Server - VPS
Contents
Install a lightweight web server, software stack, on a lightweight VPS
Background
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 problem.
The Solution
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 WordPress, Drupal 6,7 and Magento too. The MySQL root info can be found in ~root/.my.cnf.
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.
Notes
The script takes charge of all the installation steps. If you feel inclined to look at some of the steps of the installation entails (for a WordPress with nginx on Unbuntu 12.04 example) check this page or this one.
