It's trivial to run mysql (or Perforce variant) or Postgres, with some minor caching for simple apps.
I'm not sure what you are hitting that would go past the capacity of a small vps.
Independent VPs for DB make sense, but if the requests are reasonably cached, you can get away with it (and beef up the backups) especially if it's something non-critical.
I'm not sure what you are hitting that would go past the capacity of a small vps.
Independent VPs for DB make sense, but if the requests are reasonably cached, you can get away with it (and beef up the backups) especially if it's something non-critical.