[HN Gopher] Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?
___________________________________________________________________
Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?
Author : neelc
Score : 84 points
Date : 2026-01-29 15:42 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fourplex.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fourplex.net)
| miyuru wrote:
| Most low-end providers will just keep using old hardware for
| longer.
|
| IPv4 shortages didn't kill it, and I don't think this will
| either.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Exactly this. The old hardware from a year ago is fine as the
| typical use-case for a VPS didn't change.
| neelc wrote:
| For providers like us, we have to lease IPv4. We came long
| after IPv4 was already depleted. IPv4 prices did go down.
| Despite that, the $15/year 128MB BuyVM plan is long-gone.
|
| But for a new provider like us, we'd have to spend more than an
| established player like BuyVM or RackNerd who bought most of
| their servers pre-AI-boom.
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what advantages do the small VPS hosts offer
| compared to the big 3 (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)? Customer
| Service? Pricing? Local Data Center?
| nicoburns wrote:
| Pricing (both cheaper and more predictable), and reduced
| complexity.
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| Interesting. I'd have thought these giants would have better
| pricing because of the scale...
| pinkgolem wrote:
| The last comparison I did was Hetzner offers 14x the
| performance per dollar
|
| Not including the faster SSD & included traffic
| vel0city wrote:
| They give potentially worse pricing on a lot of the basic
| things (egress bandwidth, basic VM hosting, storage
| pricing) because their real value-add are all the extra
| managed services they offer on top of those things, the
| scale they're able to offer, and the more enterprise
| features.
|
| If you're using AWS/GCP/Azure to just host a couple of VMs
| for a small group you're massively overpaying.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| They don't. AWS is the most expensive hosting provider in
| the world.
| nicoburns wrote:
| They might be if they were trying to compete on price. But
| my understanding is their margins are... healthy shall we
| say.
| bombcar wrote:
| They're selling all their capabilities; using them as a VPS
| is like using a battleship to cut cheese.
|
| But if all you _really_ do with cloud stuff is "ssh into a
| server I have" (which covers a ton!) then you'll find much
| cheaper/more performant elsewhere.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I haven't been professionally involved in AWS in some time,
| and never was involved in pricing.
|
| Personally, the only thing I know of that is a true deal
| vs. competition is cold storage of data. Using the s3
| glacier tiers for long term data that is saved solely for
| emergencies is really cheap, something like $1/100GB a
| month or less.
|
| AWS is usually not the cheapest EVER when it comes to
| offerings like EC2. If you aren't doing cloud-native or
| serverless at AWS, you're probably spending too much.
| stephenr wrote:
| AWS outbound data is as much as 75x the cost of eg Hetzner.
|
| I view a large percentage of "cloud" usage like Teslas
| stock price: it's completely detached from reality by
| people who have drunk the kool aid and can't get out.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| This is why I moved off of Azure and over to Hetzner's US
| VPS's. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, some
| relatively complex .NET web apps, some automated scripts,
| etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But
| worse for me was the complexity; I found that using Azure
| encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment
| pipelines, when all I really needed was Build the container
| -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS ->
| flip a switch after testing it.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Not being Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
| iammjm wrote:
| I moved from AWS to Hetzner, because: 1. lower prices, 2. not
| American
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| Simplicity, price, stability.
| Insanity wrote:
| Not being US owned can be an important one in this geopolitical
| climate.
| xmcp123 wrote:
| Much better prices, and simplicity. The power you get from
| Hetzner or Kimsufi is crazy compared to AWS.
|
| If I need to host something small, I don't want to mess around
| with the many permissions and quirks that are required to deal
| with AWS. It is often much easier to just setup the server on a
| standalone service.
| neelc wrote:
| This.
|
| When I worked at Microsoft, I seldom used Azure for personal
| use due to it being expensive and complicated.
|
| Whereas I have plenty of Fourplex.net servers because even on
| _half_ the salary, it 's affordable enough for 16 Tor exit
| relays and two personal web/email/Mastodon servers.
| zeagle wrote:
| Until recently I had a 4gb ram 80gb ssd+2tb hd VPS running
| debian in a Montreal data centre with a real use 700 mbit pipe
| to my city with a budget provider for the equivalent of
| $80USD/year. When fio speeds were slow they moved me to a less
| crowded server. I gave it up as don't need it and moved my
| personal sites back to NFS for peanuts a year and services to
| my NAS. The pricing, offsite storage for my backups, Canadian
| sovereignty, lack of perceived complexity with a big provider
| was all attractive. I'm a physician with a tech hobby and last
| serious tech work was in the LAMP days with perl and php.
| Trying to think of learning about AWS and screwing up usage
| based billing was daunting!
| sysworld wrote:
| Yeah, don't try AWS. I tried it once and now I'm stuck with
| $0 bill emails coming each month that I can't stop.
| enlyth wrote:
| A few months ago I was going through my secondary email and
| noticed I was getting a $0.01 monthly bill from AWS.
|
| Having not used AWS for years, I logged in to check it out,
| navigated through the Kafkaesque maze of their services
| until I found what I was looking for:
|
| A lone S3 storage bucket, with one file, "Squirrel.jpg". A
| 200kB picture of a squirrel that I uploaded 8 years ago and
| can't remember why.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > I was getting a $0.01 monthly bill from AWS.
|
| I wonder what the cost to AWS was for keeping track of
| that and running your CC. There's no way they made money
| off you / that 12 cents/year cost them *at least* 12
| cents to collect every year
| zeagle wrote:
| That's funny. I kept getting a -$100 bill from a credit
| card for a few months after closing it. Eventually called
| them and suggested they can send me a cheque instead of a
| bill next time for similar reasons...
| enlyth wrote:
| IIRC the CC they had on hand had long expired and they
| never actually managed to charge me for these minuscule
| amounts, which is why I didn't notice it for so long.
| bluedino wrote:
| My vps provider bills in $5 blocks
| chneu wrote:
| AWS did some weird security thing and it invalidated my
| 2FA. I can't login to my account to update my expired card.
|
| I have $6 in charges and so now my account is locked. Lol.
| Fuck off AWS.
| gopher_space wrote:
| > Trying to think of learning about AWS and screwing up usage
| based billing was daunting!
|
| One of the hard rules we learned pre-pandemic was that
| services attached to usage based billing should really exit
| on error. It's a lesson I'm keeping in mind working with
| agents and routing (and the main reason I'm local-first).
| sekh60 wrote:
| Canadian here, could you share the name of the provider? I'd
| love to move to something more local and just need a basic
| small vps for a simple apache host. I know of a couple
| providers but never talked to anyone actually using one.
| spelk wrote:
| They're probably talking about ServaRICA. They post deals
| on LowEndTalk.
| zeagle wrote:
| It was ServaRICA as someone else suggested. It was a Black
| Friday hybrid VPS deal from a few years ago, looks like
| they still have comparable stuff on their site. For the
| cost I would generally assume anything important needs to
| be duplicated in case the company folds or a fire unless
| you pay them for such a service. (I don't have any vested
| interest in suggesting them.)
| drnick1 wrote:
| Where small VPS hosts can make a difference: require no KYC,
| accept crypto payments.
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| I'd use digital ocean over AWS for any SMB or lean startup
| (so... anyone not attached to an infinite money hose that has
| to either scale to NEED AWS, or die trying) just because of 1)
| their UI not being broken glass you have to crawl over and 2)
| not having eight trillion features that make doing simple
| things hard and 3) pricing
| buckle8017 wrote:
| 10-100x cheaper
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| If the only thing you need is "server, accessible via the
| internet, always online", and you're not interested in all the
| vendor lock-in masquerading as useful services offered by the
| big cloud providers, then small VPS hosts are 100% the way to
| go. For mid-sized servers they're cheaper (i.e., stuff that
| wouldn't be free on the big clouds, but not "I want a
| petaflop"), with more transparent pricing (I pay $12, every
| month. If I get inundated with traffic, I'll get cut off until
| I choose to pay more).
| renewiltord wrote:
| Pricing. They overprovision aggressively but most people
| actually just need a 0.1 CPU available remotely for the
| majority of their use cases.
|
| I replaced with a home server and it costs way more just in
| power hahaha.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| I used a vps service hosted in a country with strong digital
| privacy laws to host a personal wireguard+pihole vpn. I could
| probably think up a decent argument why that privacy with the
| smaller guy was only nominal but I could _absolutely_ think up
| a good argument why doing that on a big name would have no
| privacy guarantees at all, especially as someone who would be
| in the bottom rung payment-wise.
|
| Never had problems with downtime and I payed, like, 40 bucks a
| year over 3 years. I think I had to restart the thing once
| because of something dumb I did on my end.
| znpy wrote:
| Simplicity, and low price.
|
| VPS services are usually really, really simple and fairly
| cheap.
|
| I'd say that actually VPS prices is where we actually see
| computing prices going down rather than on the big 3.
|
| AWS used to optimize further and pass down the savings to the
| customers back in the day, now they don't do it anymore.
| graemep wrote:
| Low cost, simplicity and customer service.
|
| AWS does offer Lightsail which is similar pricing.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Small VPS hosts oversell like crazy and they offer much lower
| prices. Also their reliability might be worse, because they
| don't migrate VM between hosts.
| stephenr wrote:
| Others have mentioned the general pricing, simplicity etc.
|
| Outbound data pricing is a potentially huge saving.
|
| AWS is as much as $90/TB outbound with 1GB free. Hetzner is
| $1.20/TB (in EU and US) with 1TB/20TB (US/EU) free.
|
| (Good) Smaller places are more likely to have actual technical
| staff you can talk to.
| qwertox wrote:
| Price. 1 vCore, 2GB RAM, 20GB SSD, unlimited traffic (though
| throttled to 200mbit/s after transferring 2TB within 24 hours)
| = 1.85EUR
|
| That is a nice way to have a static IP on the internet and
| enough resources to do small things like host a nameserver
| and/or OpenVPN/Wireguard.
|
| I may have had 4 hours of downtime in one year, always
| announced days in advance.
| ezequiel-garzon wrote:
| Spending caps is the biggest reason for me. Granted, some VPS
| don't offer this (vital!) feature, but none of the big 3 or
| similar services do.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| I could pay like 30 bucks a month for an absolutely overspecc'd
| VPS (64GB/16c) that would cost around 20X on AWS (According to
| ChatGPT; which sounds about right based on the last time I
| cared to even look into it)
|
| Does it have a billion 9's of reliability? No, but I don't
| care, it has literally never not worked when I've used it
|
| Customer Service so far has been human, but that will vary
| greatly for the provider
|
| I also use a different provider for work related hosting, and
| the reduced latency of being within 20 ms of the DC has been
| probably the single biggest (perceived) perf improvement my
| users have ever seen, specially on the legacy webforms platform
| we recently decomissioned (We're a bit too geographically far
| for most Datacenters of most large providers)
| gruturo wrote:
| Predictable and extremely low costs for less critical stuff. My
| 2 main ones are respectively around 4 and 8 EUR per _year_.
|
| I use them to run wireguard to evade geoblocks when I'm
| travelling, a few redundant monitoring scripts alerting me of
| reachability issues of more critical stuff I care about, they
| serve as contingency access channels to my home (and home
| assistant) if my primary channels are down.
|
| I get no support, no updates, it's all on me - which is fine,
| it allows me to stay current and not lose hands-on practice on
| skills which I anyway need for my job (and which are anyway my
| passion). I don't even get an entire IPv4 - I get.... 1/3000th
| of it? (21 ports, the rest are forwarded to other customers).
| Suits me fine.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I like Vultr for the simplicity of my own projects. I really
| hate spending my time on provisioning and similar labyrinths.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| The only advantage is cheapness, for personal use.
|
| If you're a government agency or a company you don't care about
| saving $14/month, you want a secure provider. And these hosts
| are not secure, you're basically just on your own.
| vanviegen wrote:
| Without hiring/being a cloud expert, it's hard to be sure
| that you didn't leave some door wide open due to a
| configuration error. Both approaches offer more than enough
| opportunities to royally screw up.
| piou wrote:
| Most of my customers (small VPS host here) don't like the
| companies behind AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, especially the
| amount of influence they have in the world and how they wield
| it. And the pricing often isn't that much different between a
| small VPS host and either a cloud provider or one of the larger
| VPS providers (Akamai/Linode, Digital Ocean, etc.) - larger
| providers have economies of scale, but smaller providers don't
| have as much overhead for paying sales and C-suite.
|
| There's also the human touch in terms of who you talk to: a lot
| of the smallest VPS hosts are 1-2 people, both technical, so
| customer support = sysadmin = contact for everything.
| ZenoArrow wrote:
| I'd see Chinese RAM manufacturers like CXMT filling the void left
| in the market for consumer-grade RAM modules, I appreciate they
| face challenges (like lack of access to cutting edge EUV
| machines), but the RAM just needs to be fast enough and
| affordable enough for the average user for these companies to
| make significant inroads into the market that Micron, Samsung and
| SK Hynix are abandoning to chase the AI server market.
| realusername wrote:
| That's probably what is going to happen, it's a strategic
| opportunity for the Chinese government here, there's a big
| market demand that can fuel their domestic production
| capabilities that nobody wants to take.
| giantrobot wrote:
| It would be a strategic opportunity for Intel, if they
| weren't run by imbeciles. DDR4 doesn't require the latest and
| greatest nodes. It's boring old technology. Even DDR5 is
| pretty boring. Intel could clean up fabbing DRAM (like they
| used to). But alas no. They're part of the semiconductor
| cartel and uninterested in the supply of DRAM increasing.
| Prices would drop and the fabs would only make stupid margins
| instead of disgusting margins.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Intel would be in the very same bind as every other DRAM
| producer who's trying to expand production today, only far
| worse because they have practically no experience fabbing
| DRAM compared to logic. (You can fab eDRAM on logic
| processes, but you'd only do that out of sheer desperation
| since the cost per bit is _much_ higher.)
|
| What they _could_ do very easily in this market is bring
| back frickin Optane and hook it up to a modern PCIe bus
| with modern PCIe performance.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| China also needs RAM for AIs, especially since they have plenty
| of electrical power and building speed to pump out data-
| centers.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Turns out their wind "opercapacity" maybe isn't. Maybe they
| are trading chip efficiency for raw power.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Something I've been sort of wondering about--LLM training
| seems like it ought to be the most dispatchable possible
| workload (easy to pause the thing when you don't have
| enough wind power, say). But, when I've brought this up
| before people have pointed out that, basically, top-tier
| GPU time is just so valuable that they always want to be
| training full speed ahead.
|
| But, hypothetically if they had a ton of previous gen GPUs
| (so, less efficient) and a ton of intermittent energy (from
| solar or wind) maybe it could be a good tradeoff to run
| them intermittently?
|
| Ultimately a workload that can profitably consumer "free"
| watts (and therefore flops) from renewable overprovisioning
| would be good for society I guess.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I think as such intermittent power comes on the grid in
| the coming decades, people will find creative uses for
| it.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > top-tier GPU time is just so valuable that they always
| want to be training full speed ahead.
|
| I don't think this makes much sense because the "waste"
| of hardware infrastructure by going from 99.999% duty
| cycle to 99% is still only ~1%. It's linear in the
| fraction of forgone capacity, while the fraction of power
| costs you save from simply shaving off the costliest
| peaks and shifting that demand to the lows is
| superlinear.
| alecco wrote:
| They will first fill the local demand for all their electronics
| manufacturing. Then their massive computer infra and AI. And if
| any is left, it will be bundled to local PC exporters like
| Lenovo.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| It's fine if it's just filling Chinese manufacturing. Low-
| cost VPS hosts are going to be using brands like Supermicro
| anyways. It still gets exported.
|
| Except for RAM from YMTC, which the USA gave a near-death
| sentence to by placing it on the Dept. of Commerce "Entity
| List" so no USA-associated business can do business with YMTC
| now.
| neelc wrote:
| This is true.
|
| We use ASRock Rack servers, mainly because the only option
| for our industry are OEMs like Supermicro and ASRock. Dell
| and HPE are non-starters, except for our "storage"
| offering.
|
| Back in 2019, HPE was a good midrange option. Then came
| ASRock Rack who obliterated HPE with the X470D4U,
| relegating HPE to high-end enterprise servers. But also
| made Ryzen-based VPS hosts including yours truly, BuyVM, et
| al.
| nagisa wrote:
| Doesn't YMTC focus on NAND (i.e. flash storage) rather than
| DRAM? Regardless, point stands.
| neelc wrote:
| I am very hopeful of CXMT. But then then it could take a while
| for them to ramp up production. Maybe by then, the AI bubble
| would've burst.
|
| One problem with US sanctions is it could hurt US companies
| too, like in the case of cutting-edge EUV and CXMT. This is
| when China is actually a hero and not a villain.
| filloooo wrote:
| Their scale is simply too small to affect the market outside
| China, majority of their chips will be eaten up by HBM3
| production with yet unknown yield rate.
|
| They are forbidden to buy foreign equipment beyond their
| current process node, which is already obsolete, die size is
| 40% bigger than Samsung, not to mention lithography, the big 3
| are using EUV while they are stuck with lobotomized DUV.
|
| They can start making some decent money now, but vastly
| expanding capacity as is means enormous losses if the cycle
| went downward a few years later, that's how all previous makers
| went bankrupt.
|
| They can squeeze out a bit more performance if they are ready
| to go beyond their current node using only domestic equipment
| and be blacklisted by the US government.
|
| But the cap is there, unless they can make a working EUV
| machine in 5 years, they are doomed to be a minor player, if
| the current cycle even lasts that long.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Obsolete process node hardly matters when the rest of the
| market is bottlenecked on production capacity; small overall
| scale still might. Expanding capacity may or may not make
| sense; it depends on your prediction of the way the market
| will go.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| They will grow exponentially and catch the western market
| unawares in 10-15 years with a sudden flood of cheap,
| effective chips. Just like everything else China makes.
| Electric vehicles for example.
| filloooo wrote:
| Sure, if they've got production grade EUV, but right now
| they don't even have production grade DUV.
|
| I'm also sure they can go as far as 5nm like SMIC if they
| really wanted to, since it's strategic for China, but the
| cost would only be justified if the current cycle lasts
| long enough.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| They're already producing 10nm DRAM with their current nodes,
| and they're working on producing 3d DRAM which may make node
| size somewhat moot.
| filloooo wrote:
| Not 10nm, they are producing with 18.5nm and 17nm now,
| which technically already is in breach of US restrictions,
| the US government can blacklist them if they feel like it.
|
| 3D DRAM is no magic, it will only give them maybe 2
| generations' breathing room if they got the required
| etching equipment figured out. But others will be doing 3D
| DRAM with EUV by then.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| If the US government bans the import of RAM, it
| guarantees the immediate collapse of the US.
| anonym29 wrote:
| >market that Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix are abandoning to
| chase the AI server market
|
| These three have collectively committed what, approaching $50B
| towards construction of new facilities and fabs in response to
| the demand?
|
| The memory industry has traditionally projected demand several
| years out and proactively scheduled construction and
| manufacturing to be able to meet the projected demand. The last
| time they did that, in the crypto boom, the boom quickly turned
| into a bust and the memory makers got burned with a bad case of
| oversupply for years. With that context, can you blame them for
| wanting to go a bit more slowly with this boom?
|
| Sure, the new fabs won't be up and at volume production until
| late 2027 / early 2028, but committing tens of billions of
| dollars to new production facilities, including to facilities
| dedicated to DRAM rather than NAND or HBM, is hardly
| 'abandoning'. They're pivoting to higher profit margin segments
| - rational behavior for a for-profit corporation - but thanks
| to the invisible hand of the (not quite as free as it should
| be) market, this is, partially, a self-solving issue, as DRAM
| margins soar while HBM margins compress, and we're already
| seeing industry response to that dynamic, too:
| https://www.guru3d.com/story/samsung-reallocates-of-hbm3-cap...
| tokyobreakfast wrote:
| RAM shortage or competent programmer shortage?
|
| Can't get a Linux box to idle (or even install) under 512M these
| days.
|
| Can't find a web developer worth a shit who doesn't think he
| needs a Python backend application server to print "Hello, world"
| when you could do this with a static page served with something
| like OpenBSD with two-digit RAM requirements.
|
| It's not the RAM that's changed; it's everyone around the RAM.
|
| A coddled generation who were taught that AWS is the Internet and
| live in abstractions certainly hasn't helped.
| nh2 wrote:
| My NixOS SSH jump host server here idles at 234 MB of which 64
| MB is systemd-journald (which I assume can be reduced with some
| settings of how much to keep in RAM).
| tokyobreakfast wrote:
| >which 64 MB is systemd-journald
|
| why
|
| Windows NT was routinely run with 32 MB of RAM TOTAL and the
| event log is basically unchanged 30 years later.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| _Achtung_ , you will draw the ire of the systemd downvote
| zealots.
|
| Edit: Haha, withing a handful of _seconds_ I got a
| downvote. :-D
| vbezhenar wrote:
| You definitely can use Linux with few simple servers with 128
| MB RAM.
|
| Install can be tricky indeed, but if you have installed system,
| it's easier.
| tokyobreakfast wrote:
| Yeah I'll need conclusive proof of that.
| nh2 wrote:
| This is not difficult, you just need to run `htop` and
| perform addition of the RES column (which is in KB unless a
| unit is shown). Example: USER
| RESV Command root 70436 systemd-journald
| root 14268 amazon-ssm-agent root 13508
| systemd root 12160 systemd --user
| root 10240 sshd: root@pts/0 root 9088
| sshd: root [priv] root 8944 systemd-udevd
| root 8704 systemd-logind root 8320
| nix-daemon --daemon systemd-ti 8192 systemd-
| timesyncd systemd-oo 7808 systemd-oomd
| root 6492 -zsh nscd 6272 nsncd
| messagebus 5888 dbus-daemon --system --address=systemd:
| --nofork --nopidfile - root 5888 htop
| sshd 4904 sshd: root [net] root 4736
| sshd: sshd -D -f /etc/ssh/sshd_config [listener] 1 of
| 10-100 root 2960 (sd-pam) root
| 2816 agetty --login-program login ttyS0 --keep-baud
| root 2192 dhcpcd: [privileged proxy] dhcpcd
| 1680 dhcpcd: [manager] [ip4] [ip6] dhcpcd
| 1468 dhcpcd: [BPF ARP] ens5 172.31.8.86 dhcpcd
| 1168 dhcpcd: [control proxy] dhcpcd 1040
| dhcpcd: [network proxy]
| andersmurphy wrote:
| netBSD! ... o wait not linux... damn
| conductr wrote:
| If everyone is being hit by the same cost issues, small VPS hosts
| just need to charge more to operate the same. Most small VPS
| hosts are dirt cheap and I don't think many people would be
| shocked if prices go up in this environment.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yes, even if prices would triple, VPSs would still be an
| attractive offering.
| croes wrote:
| At a certain price people choose not to buy
| conductr wrote:
| Sure, the market may shrink some but it's also relative to
| alternatives that are also increasing. There's no advice in
| the article the market is shrinking or that pricing is
| causing it to. People leaving the market on this type of cost
| will likely be people that have VPS's as idle resources, like
| some forgotten subscription they don't use but never canceled
| because it's <$10 per year. If that goes up to $20 per year
| maybe it triggers them to cancel it. It's so low cost I know
| this is a portion of their profit from customers like this,
| but it's just a business problem to solve and shouldn't kill
| any provider on it's own.
|
| The comparison to 2000s telcom market does not seem similar
| at all to me.
| Tiberium wrote:
| I don't know if you can consider Netcup "small", but their RS
| 4000 G12 ("root server", basically a VPS with
| dedicated/guaranteed resources) costs ~EUR31 for a monthly
| contract for any location in Europe _without_ VAT included.
|
| It's 12 dedicated cores of a modern EPYC CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe.
|
| I got that offer during their Black Friday sale and pay
| EUR25/month (price before VAT), plus the offer I got has a 2TB
| NVMe instead of the 1TB one.
| megous wrote:
| So with 8 customers per box (AMD EPYC(tm) 9645 CPU has 96
| cores) if they have single-cpu boxes, that would need 256 GiB
| RAM.
|
| CPU launch price 11000 USD. RAM will likely be another 10000
| USD
|
| 20000 / 8 customers / 40 USD/mo = 62 months just to recoup CPU
| and RAM let alone other components.
|
| Weird, whenever I napkin math offers of any HW for renting, I
| get that I could buy it myself in 1-2 years of rent. Sometimes
| faster.
|
| Do they not intend to recoup the costs of HW? :)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 20000 / 8 customers / 40 USD/mo = 62 months just to recoup
| CPU and RAM let alone other components.
|
| the most important question is the power, such a setup will
| blow through easily 500W of power. Granted, a datacenter may
| not pay 33 ct/kWh but even then, 1/3rd of the monthly income
| will just go towards naked electricity, not including
| cooling.
|
| Electricity costs are ridiculous.
| ianseyler wrote:
| Can we get smaller VM hosts? I've seen some minimums at 512MB for
| a host. I need 8MB at most sometimes.
|
| Update: Fourplex (this host) uses a 1GB minimum.
| dpedu wrote:
| While not a small host, I thought I would mention what I observed
| with OVH's VPS offering. I was considering their line of VPSes
| recently because of how generous the cores/ram quantities were
| given the price. For example, the _smallest_ offering is 4 cores
| / 8GB at just over $4 a month.
|
| What I found is that it is cheap because the cores, and
| presumably ram, is old. Like, 2013 era Xeon E3-1275 v3 old. But
| that's fine! Old hardware like this uses old ram that is less
| affected by the current shortage. It's good enough for my needs.
| neelc wrote:
| I previously ran another VPS host who did the same exact thing
| (before OVH did it?).
|
| Unlike Fourplex.net which uses modern ASRock Ryzen 9000
| servers, Qeru.net used older HPE DL360 Gen9 servers.
|
| I gave 3GB of RAM for $3-4/mo then. But these servers weren't
| very fast. I ended up selling the business, and am happy I did.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Small VPS hosts shouldn't really exist. They're either resellers
| or just half-assing it.
|
| How can you trust Gary from GaryHosting not to just steal all
| your data? How can you trust him to have redundant networks? You
| just can't.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| Ideally all cloud applications hostable on any platform would
| just provide the following services to clients:
|
| A. rendezvous services so clients can connect to one another,
|
| B. storage/retrieval of encrypted data where the host does not
| have the key to decrypt,
|
| C. transport of encrypted data which cannot be known by the
| host due to B above.
|
| > How can you trust him to have redundant networks
|
| You can't, so abstract that away at the application layer. Make
| it not dependent on a single host or network.
| ornornor wrote:
| Your data has to be decrypted somewhere to be useable, how
| would that work?
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| Rackspace is doubling the costs across the board of everything on
| their Rackspace Cloud products. They gave us 30 days notice and
| told us to switch to the new Rackspace Cloud (OpenStack Flex)
| with no tools to do so.
| imglorp wrote:
| The US passed the Chips act in 2022. Is there really nobody
| reaching for those billions ready to crank out some memory four
| years later?
| gravypod wrote:
| This was in the news recently:
| https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
| direwolf20 wrote:
| RAM is still cheaper than 10 years ago. Every time you ask "are
| RAM prices killing X?" ask yourself if we had X 10 years ago.
| dijit wrote:
| I'm not sure this holds up when you look at the actual numbers.
| In 2016, you could get a DDR4-2400 16GB kit for $81 [1], and a
| comparable G.SKILL Ripjaws V kit was around $52 [2]. Today
| (January 2026), that same G.SKILL kit costs $105-146 [3], and
| most 16GB DDR4 kits are running $95-150 [4]. So RAM is actually
| _more expensive_ now than it was 10 years ago, not cheaper.
|
| The "did we have X 10 years ago" argument also misses a a lot
| of modern software requirements. Yes, we had mid-range laptops
| and budget gaming PCs in 2016, but the memory footprint of
| everyday applications has exploded since then. Electron-based
| apps (Slack, Teams, VS Code, Discord) routinely consume
| 500MB-1GB+ _each_ [5], and it 's entirely normal to have
| multiple running simultaneously. A typical "light" workload in
| 2026 easily uses 2-3x the RAM that a comparable workflow needed
| in 2016.
|
| So we're getting squeezed from both sides: applications demand
| more memory whilst memory itself costs more. An 8GB laptop was
| perfectly serviceable for office work in 2016; in 2026, it's
| borderline unusable with a few Chrome tabs and Teams open. The
| same kit that cost $55 in June 2025 now costs $150 [2, again].
| That's a 150%+ increase in six months, pushing capable systems
| out of reach for budget-conscious users precisely when software
| bloat is making RAM more essential than ever.
|
| [1] https://gamersnexus.net/industry/3212-ram-price-
| investigatio... [2] https://gamersnexus.net/news/ram-wtf [3]
| https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=ddr4+ram+8gb [4]
| https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ [5]
| https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/
| iszomer wrote:
| In late 2024 I bought a 32GB kit with unbuffered ECC for ~80$
| /shrug
| kkfx wrote:
| If we follow events at high-zoom:
|
| - first graphics cards
|
| - then RAM
|
| - now NVME drives
|
| The result? PCs become hyper-expensive and also hard to assemble
| for mere lack of components, then we get to VPS and keep going.
| The computing that remains is mobile and cloud, "the only
| integrated platforms," meaning the absence of digital ownership
| for most people, total control by the giants.
|
| Think of it in these terms: nowadays GNU/Linux is starting to be
| a sought-after desktop, nowadays we can self-host with levels of
| accessibility even for newbies that we didn't have in the past,
| and the interest in doing so for those who know something is
| stronger than ever. And here come the reasons not to do it,
| economic and also physical.
|
| Does it sound like "flat-earthism"? Well, it also sounds very
| realistic, at least net of the effects, we can say it's
| conspiracy theorizing, but thinking ill is a sin but you often
| guess right, said a prime minister a long time ago with a list of
| extraordinary scandals behind him.
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