Seeing you mentioned Tornado, WordPress not being so attractive, and $20 for a 512MB VPS makes me wonder if this was sometimes around 2010-2012? A lot of comments here seems to mention $5/mo VMs, but if this was around that time period, then I don't think $20 is unreasonable at all!

(I used RootBSD back then and they only gave you 256MB for $20 ;-)