@tonyshowoff said in LAMP on the cheap, or how to optimize ?:
Installing crappy cPanel is like buying a sports car and putting a boot on the wheel. There's literally no good reason what so ever to have it, it's slow as hell and eats resources like crazy. Just learn a few commands and you'll be fine.
Don't get yourself stuck with PHP 5.x, it's a dead end, fix your code now and/or do it right from the start and use PHP 7.
Apache with mod_php is a hell of a lot faster than PHP-FPM, because it's executed as a part of your running httpd thread pool rather than executing PHP literally every single page request. Nginx is faster than Apache except when it comes to PHP then hands down always use Apache with mod_php. If you turn on PHP 7's opcache you'll do even better.
In case you consider it and try to go with nginx, since that's what the cool kids try to push on people, OPcache won't make up for PHP-FPM having to literally start a process every single page request, every, single, page request. Nginx is a great reverse proxy though.
It also depends on what you're doing overall, memcached is great I've used it on a huge scale but what are you caching? What database are you looking at using, that'd really be the only reason to have an object cache like memcached at all.
Interesting, I will see how it performs without PHP FPM.