Configurations for hosting web server and database on separate droplets

[HJW]

It's probably time I changed my config from hosing everything on a single 8 cpu 16gb droplet:


I'm currently on the highest shared cpu plan from digital ocean.

Moving forward can anyone offer any advice as to what setup to go for next?

1) keep everything on the one box and upgrade to a dedicated cpu (64gb / 16 CPUs) $540
2) new shared cpu for mysql (16gb / 8 CPUs) $80
3) new dedicated cpu on a cpu optimized plan (16gb 8 CPUs) $160

as things are running pretty well at the moment apart from a slight slowdown at peak times I'm tempted to go for the cheapest option 2, but really not sure how to judge what I'd need and if I would need something less powerful if its a dedicated CPU?

Any advice of how best to scale this up?

 

[dknife]

I've been looking at moving my database to one of the new managed database droplets on DO. Would be great to hear if anyone has any experience with them, especially if there's much of a write penalty.