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I knew about Atom-based dedicated servers, but these plug-class servers take it to whole new level of low-end extreme.

Most of WordPress optimization talk is about surviving on shared hosting or scaling up.

I got curious - how viable is it to run WordPress on such low-end, but dedicated hardware? At which point will CPU or slow storage become bottleneck? How will it compare to generic shared hosting (even lower resources, but no neighbors and freedom to optimize).

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I have similar problems, and IMHO it is not the slow CPU or storage what is killing me - it is the architecture of WordPress that creates extremely complex environment from scratch on every page load, just so the plugins can cherry-pick tiny tidbits of functionality that is actually needed. – Roman Zenka Feb 26 '11 at 14:58

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I think it really breaks down to your traffic. The slower the hardware, the slower (the already slow) page generation. It's not specific to WP, it's the same for all large php scripts.

If you get a server hit every now and then, as on a dev box or a family blog, it's no big deal. It'll just spit out pages more slowly. If you get concurrent hits on a regular basis, your site will get knocked off of the web quite easily.

Also note that many a low end shared host stuffs multiple sites on low end hardware. It's obviously not as low end as what you linked to, but I wouldn't expect that much of a difference in performance as compared to an overstuffed shared server.

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Page generation time doesn't matter that much - static cache is easy, even on shared. But on dedicated box you can have opcode cache, reverse proxy and whatever (distant dream on shared). But will better software setup on weaker hardware be able to sustain performance?.. – Rarst♦ Oct 11 '10 at 13:09
As long as apache/php/mysql runs, you're fine. It'll just be slower, even if you fine tune things. Slow hardware will, well, be slower. :-) – Denis Oct 11 '10 at 21:35
i'd add, though, that page generation does count. It's what'll make or break your site when it comes to concurrent requests. Even with a static cache turned on. – Denis Oct 11 '10 at 21:37

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