My only experience with compiling Haskell on a VPS involved over 100gb of swap I/O happening during a >24 hours compilation of LambaBot on a 512mb machine.
In a utilitarian sense, the pain caused by this could probably be greatly reduced with a robust system of cached binary builds. Right now we're all just compiling the same dependency trees over and over again, wasting cycles.
So since making GHC drastically more efficient is an enormous problem, maybe getting Stack/Cabal to download binary caches would be the best way to go forward.
There's a Nix build server that offers all of Stackage in binary form. That really takes a lot of pain away, at least if you're on a supported architecture (x86_64, I guess). But it's run by a volunteer individual, I think.
Of course, Debian and others have been packaging Haskell binaries forever, but I don't think most people want to deal with distribution packages for development.
I'm sure there are lots of discussions about this in other places... All I've found from my random googling is this post which is about binary sharing on the same computer:
I've seen Stack download prebuilt binaries for some packages but build others... always having prebuilt versions of text/aeson/vector/lens/etc would definitely speed up resolver upgrades.
