I imagine even a $10 VPS should be a much more powerful machine than a high-end server from 2005 or so.
And if you pay $10/month for a single threaded machine, you’re overpaying by a lot.
For a half-decent VM, I'd be expecting multi-thousand.
Single figures a second, is choked to a single connection at a time.
Using Django is like trying to walk on a highway, with a crutch. Even though it has some convenience features, it's just so impossibly slow you would have to invest a lot of engineering time and resources to mitigate that slowness.