Hosting for phpBB

[tonyandpals]

My wife runs a mommy board and the performance is horrible.
 
Current host is Dreamhost.  They have a VPS and use a memory manager tool to adjust on the fly. It still reboots daily and at times is just inaccessible.
 
Site has 200+  users
1k posts a day (80 or so new topics, skrub loves new threads
MySQL(i) 5.1.56-log)
database size: 1gb
phpBB version 3.0.12
 
Why does this run like such shit? Dreamhost tells me it's out of memory and rebooted for that reason 5 times today. Default is 300MB and I have no idea if that should be enough. They say just increase it and see if the problem goes away. But I wonder is there something else causing it to slowly creep up and crap out. Throwing memory and money at it in that case seems useless.
 
So, ditch dreamhost? Add more memory? Prune the DB?

 

[Blacken]

Dreamhost's VPSes are not real VPSes and they're utterly fucked, but almost nobody knows how to properly configure PHP (or phpBB) for decent performance. Get off of them, go to Digital Ocean, get somebody to properly configure it, pay like $10/month or so and life is good.

 

[tonyandpals]

So I signed up for Digital Ocean.  Followed the steps to here:
 
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-linux-apache-mysql-php-lamp-stack-on-ubuntu-14-04
 
to install apache (after creating a new non root user)
 
All seemed to go well, accept I call up the site by IP and I get a 404, not the default Ubuntu page.
 
I feel like I am missing something basic here.  I'm usually "okay" at this kind of stuff...