Why does my Drupal install hang at the database step?

Ubuntu LAMP image. When I install Drupal via the web-accessible install process the installation process hangs twice:

1. When I first enter the MySQL username/password and hit submit it appears to do nothing, no error is given, it just blanks out the form and I have to enter the credentials again.
2. After entering MySQL credentials the 2nd time it takes me to a blank page when normally there is an installation status bar. When I hit back I then get the status bar and Drupal installs normally without any errors and functions fine.

I have reproduced those exact errors repeatedly and it always behaves the same, I enter credentials twice and then hit my browser’s back button to actually get the next page.

I’m very new to VPS management so I don’t really know where to start. I ran the top command this last time and didn’t really see anything. MySQL was showing up as using a bit of memory every few seconds and then it would go away. The site works fine once installed but this still concerns me. I would use the Drupal image by DO but it is using nginx and I have no experience with that either so I’d like to try and stick to what I know but now I’m stuck with this strange behavior.