From Shared hosting to VPS. How to choose right Droplet size?

This question was answered by @Zivci:

Depends on how busy your websites are, really.

All you need, for smoothly running and snappy responsive websites are 256MB of memory allocated to the system (CentOS 7) and up-under ~1GB of memory for the web-server, database and interpreter-engine (php, etc.).

With that in mind, the 512MB of memory droplet would be marginal for your needs, and it may appear to be rather sluggish over time. I would recommend the 1GB of memory droplet to start off with. Are you hosting 10+ relatively small web-spaces, like small company sites for clients, blogs, small community sites like forums etc., then this option offers more than enough juice to cover your needs.

Best option is to go with the 1GB droplet, using CentOS 7 with the LEMP-setup, refer to https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-linux-nginx-mysql-php-lemp-stack-on-centos-7 for installation instructions. This setup will give you a very lightweight web-server that can handle tons of request on low resources.

Remember, at Digital Ocean you can always upgrade your droplet on-the-go to add more resources, for instance double the amount of memory or expand hard-drive space, without the need to start all over again. So, follow their general advice; start off small - scale up when needed.

And good luck! :)

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