OK - just wanted to update people on this in case you’re thinking about this. I’ve just had to upgrade from the basic 1GB droplet account on Digital Ocean because my disk and memory utilization was maxing out. I had to stop doing backups the past few weeks to keep the site going, and yesterday it froze under heavy load - so I upgrade to the $12/month account (2 GB Memory / 50 GB Disk / SFO3 - Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS) x64).
Here is the traffic level the past week that required this upgrade. Obviously every forum will be a little different, but this gives you a general idea, from google analytics:
