This site and a few others that I host all run on a virtual private server. This server is quite fast by itself but loaded up with services like Apache and MySQL, not to mention hosting heavyweight web frameworks like Drupal, it’s limited resources make it not quite so snappy.
I’ve been working on replacement configuration for the server (on my own computer running on VMWare Workstation) to be able to provide the same services while halving the memory usage (from 512mb to 256mb) and not hitting the swap except in edge cases.
The server currently runs Apache, MySQL and PHP along with Dovecot and Postfix for email as well as a few other scripts for virus checking and spam filtering.
My new server config looks to be running Nginx, MySQL, PHP, Dovecot and Postfix. Pretty much the same except everything has been tweaked and optimised for lower memory usage.
I have also enabled caching for this website so it should be a bit faster now. Not that it was that slow before.
Update from 12th May 2018: 9 years on and I’m still using Nginx as my web server of choice. Even have the t-shirt.