Yes.
@eva2000 CentminMod (CMM) running nginx + memcached on a 2vCPU will do wonders (as, I believe, but will let him correct me, PDO [which makes it even faster], will only work on 2vCPU).
Even doing tests with minimal users (10-50) on a $3 1vCPU and 2gb memory VPS, it was blazing fast.
It takes a while to get a grasp of, but once done... it might be comparable to Litespeed, unless you're running 10000s of users, and a refund + tip to him would be helpful as he will answer pretty much every question in detail you ask on his forum.
I don't think I've had an issue in a while... but the last response from him was a book and boggled my mind for a while.
The only difference, if running a moderately small community, in my opinion between the two, is that Lightspeed offers GUI control panels (on the web) whereas CMM is all command line, but efficiently set up to be just as "GUI" like as any other control panel, so to speak. However, in that case, you might as well just run cPanel hosting as there probably will be 0 difference anyway.
Edit: My dev server is $3 with CMM as I only run 1 user (myself) and test users (myself) and there is no lag time between page loads, even with caching off as I need to see real-time updates, logged in and logged out.