Drupal is a great CMS but is a bit hefty when you host it on bargain-basement shared hosting, and virtual private servers are great but memory-constrained at the low-end. Apache can be a big offender when it comes to resource usage, so a nice alternative is nginx, a fast, light-weight and efficient http server that supports PHP via PHP-FastCGI. So this is a pretty slick setup for hosting Drupal, and I've taken a few different howtos and forum posts to put together this guide, which should have all you need in one stop, including a working URL rewrite config.