Hello, @arbutt1010

This really depends on the website itself. If there are no heavy memory consuming plugins like woo-commerce or website builder plugins then 512MB should be enough as a startup. The good thing is that you can always upgrade the droplet in case you need more memory.

I would still recommend you to start with 1GB RAM since 512MB might be not suitable for your needs. You can also choose our new droplets with Intel or AMD CPUs.

You can always upgrade your droplet in the future if you want to boost the performance of the droplet and the site itself.

Hope that this helps!
Regards,
Alex

Hi @arbutt1010,

It’s really hard to pinpoint the exact setup you’ll need without knowing all the variables. The one thing everything depends on is the website.

I’ll try to mention each factor that plays a big role in a server/droplet handling a website.

1. Firstly, let’s take a look at the server-side.

Server side-wise, the factor can be determined by two things, how well is the server optimized and what services it’s using. Usually, you have a type of SQL(MySQL)and a WebService (Apache/Nginx) at the very least. In regards to MySQL and how much the server can handle it depends on the databases, if they are not optimized a lot less than usual. The same goes regarding Apache/Nginx.

Having said the above, there are ways to optimize them and increase their productivity like using server-side caching services like OPcache. Additionally, regarding web services, you can use php-fpm for instance which again increases its capacity.

1. The next big thing is your website and how heavy it is.

Again, like the server-side stuff, you can always optimize it to increase its productivity on the server. These optimizations can be in caching your website, optimizing image sizes, minimizing javascript, CSS, and other similar file sizes, and so on.

All in all, there is no formula as far as I’m aware that will help you with estimating this unless you know all the variables. My suggestion is always the same. Start with the smallest droplet and when you see the need, upgrade it to a bigger one.

As for a 512MB RAM and if it would be enough, I believe in these days, that’s quite low so I’ll suggest starting with a 1GB RAM droplet.

Regards,
KFSys