Yes, you can do a lot. I run my blog based on LAMP / suPHP hosting, Webfusion, not GoDaddy, but their common implementation architectures are pretty similar: a load balancing IP switch that goes to the LAMP server farm, which then switched the 1Gb gateway to the NAS infrastructure for user directory space and a D / B farm for database management. (And yes, I also have an instance of Amazon EC2 micro.)
This type of service offerings is inexpensive, scalable, and does not include the account holder in the known manner of setting up and administering a cloud virtual machine. I also save all contents and configuration in backend D / B. My blog has an average page load time (measured by Chome Pagespeed) of 200-500 ms and PageSpeed of 99/100.
So yes, in the suPHP configuration, each script includes activating a PHP image, which usually adds ~ 100 ms to request a time ( this article explains how to compare this for your own service), but when you synchronize transactions from a point end-user perspective, this is usually poor caching and lack of compression for working with dogs. After you figure this out, then the image will start to run, which you cannot avoid for dynamic content - unless Zeus offers it, you will switch to dedicated VM + mod_php5 + Xcache / APC.
The next big hit is the I / O overhead for sorting and reading in all the script files, and this may add a few seconds to the first request when they are not in the VFAT cache, but again I discuss mitigation in my blogs.
PHP compilation time and script execution time are in noise - if you havenβt done something really dumb, for example, doing a full table scan or joining the same for large tables that were not properly indexed.
In any case, I wrote a bunch of articles that cover a topic for developers like you. Read them and I hope you find them useful. Please come back here with Qs, but remember to focus on them; also make sure that you provide supporting information and do not use it as a substitute for a reasonable level of research. :-)