a 1vCPU 512mb instance is plenty for most base cases. Maybe you need one additional machine to act as a background worker. I am sure there are some noisy neighbors but to say its underpowered is silly.
I'm calling it underpowered because the $5 one had trouble running my custom ssh daemon. ssh! the cryptography for that shouldn't chug down the server I'm renting from them. a bigger instance from them isn't having the same problems.
