I’ve found a way around this limitation. The first thing you need to understand is that this is a limitation imposed because the install script needs more than 512mb of RAM to install correctly. Therefore, they require a $10 server as it has 1GB of ram.
An easy workaround is to setup and install an ubuntu $5 server (don’t worry about which version, you’ll be destroying it shortly). Then go into the droplet and do a FLEXIBLE resize to a $10 server (this will upgrade the CPU/RAM but not the HDD size). DO NOT CLICK ON PERMANENT RESIZE!
Once that is completed, go to the “destroy” menu under that droplet and rebuild it using the “Ubuntu Wordpress on 14.04” image. Since the droplet has 1GB of ram, it will allow the installation to progress.
Once that is completed, power off the droplet and do another flexible resize back to a $5 server.
Wordpress should run ok on a $5 server for most applications, so once the installation has been done on a $10 server you should be able to maintain your site on a cheaper server.
You can set it up on the $5 droplet, but you have to manually install the necessary components. I rooted around for ppas for PHP 7.1, MySQL 5.7 deb from Oracle, and Apache 2.4. While Nginx has a lighter memory footprint I’m less experienced with it but I have it running.
It’s running perfectly for me and I even got Let’s Encrypt’s certbot-auto installed and have SSL set up with the SSL Apache mod which is more memory usage, but seems to run fine. There is an issue though as using Ubuntu 12 LTS 32-bit is the OS you want to go with for the most minimal memory footprint. When you use that version it only takes about 92 megs of memory. Also while I haven’t done it yet, I used the MySQL memory calculator and you can get the MySQL footprint down to 52 megs or less.
Below are 3 links I used to get the newest of PHP, MySQL, and Apache if you like. Later I’m gonna through a tutorial page on my site for this process for anyone that might be interested and don’t want to do the footwork. If I get it up very soon and remember I’ll come back and link to it.
Some of these aren’t labeled as being for Ubuntu 12 LTS, but they work anyway.
Note: Do not install LAMP. Install these individually.
Apache 2.4.x:
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2011603
PHP 7.1:
https://ayesh.me/Ubuntu-PHP-7.1
MySQL 5.7:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/750498/mysql-5-5-update-to-mysql-5-7