Ultimate Optimized WordPress Server

I’m looking to build a WordPress server on a VPS. There are guides out there to do a basic LAMP stack, and I’ve done that in the past. But because a VPS has limited resources, I’m looking for an optimal build in performance and security.

Is nginx really the way to go over Apache?

And my last WordPress install on Apache ended up with a lot of .htaccess rewrite rules and I’m not sure how to implement them in nginx.

For PHP, should I run FPM or Fast-CGI?

Should I run PHP-NG, HHVM or what? Check out these benchmarks – https://kinsta.com/blog/real-world-wordpress-benchmarks-with-php5-5-php5-6-php-ng-and-hhvm/

Should I run another DB other than MySql?

There are literally millions of WordPress sites out there. I’m assuming someone has to have a guide on how to build the best possible WordPress server right now.