I just installed a frech copy of Ubuntu 12.04 on my vps because my old installation was very slow, unfortunately this did not fix the problem. With slow I mean requests for my PHP websites take a long time, very slow (30 sec per request) to slow (3+ sec per request). When it's really bad SSH is also laggish. The websites are: askmike.org (pretty standard Wordpress) mvr.me (own PHP) slow? very slow: Here is a picture of loading a clean install of wordpress slow: here is a picture of loading a small PHP based website the vps The VPS has 256mb ram and an 25GB hdd. Besides serving the 2 small websites it isn't doing anything AFAIK. What have I installed Clean Ubuntu server 12.04 LAMP stack few things like git and nodejs (not using both) ossec (because I thought my server was getting hammered) munin What I already tried / done I installed munin so that I could watch io speed and such. The problem is that I don't know where to look for in the munin report. I checked logs and don't see anything strange (although I don't really know where to look for besides strange / repetitive errors and GET requests). I configured Apache MPM to: <IfModule mpm_prefork_module> StartServers 5 MinSpareServers 5 MaxSpareServers 10 MaxClients 40 MaxRequestsPerChild 0 </IfModule> (apache is using prefork, the default) Stats I copied the munin report as it appeared at 4:50 last night to a site hosted on a shared webhost. Note that tonight my mysql crashed somewhere after 1:00 (which is a new problem altogether), so therefor the graph for last night might look strange. Can anyone help me get my VPS up to normal speed? EDIT: Thanks for the replies. The VPS is 10 bucks a month and is from directvps.nl (Dutch host and I'm also dutch). I did two speed tests for disk IO: $ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 23.1506 s, 46.4 MB/s $ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 39.3796 s, 27.3 MB/s Anyway: how can I prove to my VPS host that it is to slow? I can understand a server being busy slowing a website down. But 5-30 sec loadtime for a normal PHP webpage?