Im speaking from my experience only, it may or may not suitable your or others.

You would need a bare bone clean install of Debian 7 or Centos 6

Then install https://vestacp.com/

It contains nginx+apache2, php 5.5, mysqld 5.5

With at least 1GB ram vesta-php will be run in php-fpm mode which has a nice response time compare to plain old php-cgi and apache2-mod-php.

Why nginx+apache2? nginx will be served as static http resources server, it has better caching performance compare to heavily armed apache. Why still apache? I can't live without .htaccess, although there is converter to nginx rules and transition layers out there, but they are so alien to me. I happy with apache.

Those are just explanation. All setup done by vestacp-installer for easy of use and performance, could save you ton of times by manually install and configure them to work together, come with an handy catchy web interface.

After installed vestacp, for security., please search their documentation for installation of fail2ban (it's anti bruteforce daemon). I found it quite easy to follow.

use yum or apt-get to install php extensions that required by oxwall.

I would recommend cloudflare as a free cdn service, other may have different opinions, but in my experience, it was great. Free minification, free ssl certs, free static caching, etc., with $25 a month you can enjoy even more, like latest spdy tech buzz.

Next, if you want more speed you could try google pagespeed module, it may take awhile to get its configuration done right, I think it has been worth my time.

I hope that would help.

Cheers,

Thao

P/S: the above configuration is on a DigitalOcean cloud instance. Currently, I run 5 websites on it. One of them is Oxwall, could be found here https://owdemo.songphi.com/