With a database that small, performance shouldn't ever be noticeable. Are you running the DB on EBS?
1) If you are having trouble with tweaking my.cnf, give the perl script `mysqltuner` a go. It is pretty good.
2) The biggest improvement would be moving the storage to SSDs. I personally prefer Linode to DO, but both are cheap, and good.
My linode servers can do full text non-blocking backups at about 100MB per second, so depending on your outage recovery requirement, you may be able to get away with a simple cron job.
1) If you are having trouble with tweaking my.cnf, give the perl script `mysqltuner` a go. It is pretty good.
2) The biggest improvement would be moving the storage to SSDs. I personally prefer Linode to DO, but both are cheap, and good.
My linode servers can do full text non-blocking backups at about 100MB per second, so depending on your outage recovery requirement, you may be able to get away with a simple cron job.