I have bad hosting with good software. Ran flawlessly with 8-15ms generation times on #3 of the HN homepage for a couple hours, only the network latency went up to at peak ~1.2 seconds (got less than 1mbps upload here). The page also executes multiple database queries for each pageload, just like Wordpress. No caching needed for me, it's all about optimization.
Well, the mistake in this particular case is probably allowing more web application processes than database connections from those processes, which is an easy thing to get wrong.
Self written, no framework used. It's a simple blog with quite custom requirements so I figured whynot just build a custom one. It runs on an Intel Atom, 1GB RAM (and there's more to run than a wamp stack). and 832kbps uplink.
As for software, I wrote it for PHP 5.3 (nowadays upgraded to 5.4 though) with MySQL and persistent database connections. The server is Windows 7 with apache 2.4.
