Its 512mb
with volume I assume you mean like users and traffic ? if so it will mostly be me only.. and maybe sometimes 1 to 4 people max at a time minus robots and crawlers.

when you say 512 on Joomla and wordpress 512 does that account for having both of them or both would need 1gig?

I am willing to upgrade it later to more than 1gig ram have a budget and its still very experimental..

But I do eventually am planning to stick with 1, need both Joomla and Wordpress for just a few days at a time demonstration purposes and might keep doing that while im learning them both at the end I will want to keep one then and work on learning css, php, html5, python and django.

@darknite

If you're running database-driven websites, I'd start with 1GB of RAM -- even if traffic is minimal. That should give you a little breathing room to work on your projects without any issues.

While you can run LAMP and LEMP Stacks on 512MB of RAM, you need to know how to tweak and tune the configurations to work in such a low-resource environment. Apache and MySQL can take up quite a bit of RAM on their own, which makes 512MB dwindle down to nearly nothing relatively quick.

Okay. thx guys for the answers.

offtopic : now I stumbled upon NGinx ( When I googled what LEMP is) and according to one test it takes up way less RAM and system resources I wonder how true that is..\

where is the password when I create a new droplet, each time I have to do password reset because my account password never works on new droplets..

and when I tried to update Wordpress in the AdminCP and entered the root SFTP details that works on FileZilla (username: root and my account password) it didn't work.

@darknite

@hansen would be right on the mark -- my full recommendation goes to NGINX over Apache in more than 99.99% of the cases I work with. This one would be no different.

NGINX does indeed use less RAM than Apache in both high and low-traffic scenarios as it doesn't do dynamic configuration processing. You have to reload or restart NGINX anytime changes are made.

NGINX also "outsources" requests to PHP-FPM using FastCGI (a proxy of sorts), instead of building in a module like Apache does (i.e. mod_php).

At the end of the day, NGINX simply takes a request and pushes it somewhere else, which is why it can handle more traffic than Apache in most all scenarios, and do it with fewer resources. Apache handles things a little differently, builds modules in to the configuration, etc -- that all equates to a lot more resources being used for, in my experience, sub-par performance.

...

For example, with Apache there's a file called .htaccess, which is what WordPress uses to handle the permalink rewrites (i.e. instead of index.php?p=32 you see /category/post-title).

You can make any number of changes to .htaccess without restarting Apache as that file will be read and processed on-the-fly (i.e. on each request).

With NGINX, if you make changes to the configuration, the only way they take effect is when you do a reload or restart NGINX altogether. NGINX also doesn't use .htaccess, and the rewrites are a little bit different, but I find them far more simplistic.

The typical WordPress .htaccess looks like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

With NGINX, that gets shrunk down to:

location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}

The location block basically tries a URL without a slash, with a slash, and if neither of those are able to handle the request, it pushes the request to index.php with $args which would be, in the case of WordPress, the post ID, category ID, etc. You don't have to worry about that part though, just having the $args in the location block above is all you need to worry about having in place.

You guys rock... ill go with the LEMP stack.