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?
A fixed plan that is not so flexible, not pay-as-you-go, but predictable and economical. Elastic cloud are elastic in terms of that you can change the compute you want, you can change the storage, either block or object, and you can use their premium network as much as you can, long as you have the money and got clearance on the end of the month. Scaling is therefore what those elastic cloud offers, albeit in a premium price.
Meanwhile, small service providers might not actually need those premium features, and just want something that is cheap and makes economical sense. They don't need the state-of-the-art hardware and just want something that works.
That's why while the AAGO (AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle) attracted a lot of big corpo, that is, almost all of Forbes 500s used them, DigitalOcean and Vultr, with their $5 plan, is those who won the small businesses.
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.
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.
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.
Some dirt-cheap VPS maybe too unreliable to run anything serious, that's why they sell that for dirt cheap. And their consumers generally won't complain about sudden server reboots, because that's what expected for the price.
If they increase their prices, then many of their customers maybe better off just use Linode or DigitalOcean etc instead, as these vendors provides better guaranty on stability.
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 ~€31 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 €25/month (price before VAT), plus the offer I got has a 2TB NVMe instead of the 1TB one.
Running modern full-fat Linux on anything sub-512MB isn't a great experience unless you're willing to do a lot of tweaking, or running specialized distros like alpine. If dropping the whole "vm" thing is an option, you can go much lower -- I've been running perfectly usable alpine lxc system containers on as low as 32MB -- though container-based vps kind of fell out of favor in the last couple years, probably due to the issues that come with not having your "own" kernel in "your" vps. Virtuozzo/openvz was everywhere back then, now it's pretty much all kvm/vmware/hyperv.
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.
Btw, Hetzner seems to have slightly cheaper offer for such small VPSs, and their disk i/o is much better than at OVH. (My own tests; I always compare the storage speed)
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.
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.
Okay this is the type of post I want to see and the answer is absolutely an yes.
For context, I think I have recently been part of the lowendbox community and discussing things with providers etc.
Recently one of their providers actually cited the price increase directly to ram increase.
I was in talks with other VPS providers one of whom literally shared me a photo in the forum of what it costs them to get ram in their area.
I have been in talks with many many people within the VPS community and I have said this so many ocuntless times in here or lowendtalk (you can read my comments although I used to say this ~1 month ago iirc)
Heck, I wanted to build my own cloud. My father works in the bandwidth business (essentially you can say broadband/wifi)for ~10-15 years/ has very strong ties in it.
I on the other hand like/love tinkering with software side of things including virtualization and have made projects about it. I shared some request one month ago to talk to my dad and he said he was interested in datacenter idea
But I shit you not, it literally doesn't make sense even though A) my father has its own office, b) he can get essentially lots of bandwidth for free, C) we live in country with very cheap electricity comparative to many others.
And even if you have lots of hardwares, it doesn't just make sense to still have it if the price of replacement has increased so much far far.
There is also a forum called lowendspirit and I saw someone shut down their service citing this as well.
There are many posts on lowendbox (in which I have talked to) talking about the same thing as well
Simply I don't know how to state it, but the 4x price increase within ram simply literally didn't make sense. No thanks. I (or we?) are gonna wait the AI bubble or do something else/work more on software sides/just relax instead of making this.
I haven't even read the post but this is the most connected post I have felt in a long time!
To be really honest, I will admit that right now, personally I am either looking at mac 512 gb ultra or something which are still not ramflated from what I can tell or something or to be really honest, most cloud providers are burning money to not create a frenzy or still have pricing the same.
Personally, I love small cloud providers but recent times indiciate to me to favour stability. I have a netcup server myself but hetzner is an absolute love too from what i can tell and I can recommend any & OVH is another brilliant solution. All European.
Because these have/probably have large supplies. Soo like I know that OVH literally creates their own machiens, buys land and does everything and is a stock company so they are kind of a capital expenditure -> getting maximal profits machine in some sense (like yknow eliminating as much as middleman as possible kind of thing?) soo I guess the chances of OVH has lots of money to burn through to survive & brand reputation is crucial too and usually many of these run Black friday sometimes too
I guess another part is that most cloud providers can offset the losses right now for the hardware which can get cheap when the AI hardware bubble bursts but I odn't really know. I guess OVH or others might internally discuss this possibility too.
Atleast for me, I am gonna build software regarding the projects. I have found a huge disprecancy where whmcs and others have an almost monopoly so I am probably gonna spend a few months creating an open source project alternative (technically I already have a preview working with gvisor which I used with my netcup vps itself because gvisor can work in kvm machines itself not requiring nested kvm)
To be honest, shit's really hit the fan in this industry in ways that I can't tell. I have/had been in talks with an UK provider (https://xhosts.uk) [promoting because seems like a good guy] & he said that he's suffering the losses/takin...
I dunno if DSL-based ISPs were going to last in the US. I mean, in a big country the range limits of DSL make it hard to compete with cable. I get 20Mbps at my location with fiber-to-the-node, but people a few miles down the road get 10x that speed with Time Warner cable for the same price. In some place like the Netherlands or South Korea it might be different, but not here.
and often those monopolies where (initially) build with public funding.
i don't think these characteristics apply to DRAM/semiconductor related facilities as we have them today.
i think the only "thing" which could "save us" from our own and the DRAM manufactures "greed" are new factories ... anywhere, but right now china looks "the most promising" at least to me.
additionally: i think these articles could be seen as somewhat related
The RAM prices could cause serious scaling issues for everyone right now, including small businesses that deal with healthcare for example. Speaking from personal experience.
I and others are having the feeling this is actually a manufactured shortage to kill all remaining self and small hosters forcing them to move to the large cloud providers.
In general terms I think that very small, very cheap hosts can use secondhand hardware, think DDR3/4 where RAM is still affordable. The 'Great' deals you see are mostly that. There are still $6/month for 2core/4GB VPS on EPYC if you need good performance (e.g example via https://serversearcher.com) but those types are unlikely to get any cheaper, for sure.
I think that poorly optimised software is killing small VPS hosts... We used to have very usable systems with less than 1MB of RAM.
I've personally built a smart watch that connects to the internet, helps me perform organisation duties, all whilst running (micro-)Python, in far less RAM. To do the equivalent on desktop would require some form of sandboxed browser engine, JavaScript and some weird client-server stack.
I recently upgraded my servers with RackNerd from 768MB to 1GB because it was near free to do so, but I didn't need that extra memory. Before anybody claims they don't do anything, these servers deal with thousands of users a day.
I'm cautiously hoping that we start to see a period of optimisation again. There is currently zero incentivize to optimise anything any more, even if it negatively affects the end user.
30 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 45.1 ms ] threadIPv4 shortages didn’t kill it, and I don’t think this will either.
Meanwhile, small service providers might not actually need those premium features, and just want something that is cheap and makes economical sense. They don't need the state-of-the-art hardware and just want something that works.
That's why while the AAGO (AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle) attracted a lot of big corpo, that is, almost all of Forbes 500s used them, DigitalOcean and Vultr, with their $5 plan, is those who won the small businesses.
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.
I still have 64 MB VPS (OpenVZ) which I use in production since 2012. It runs DNS, VPN, some logging stuff.
Some dirt-cheap VPS maybe too unreliable to run anything serious, that's why they sell that for dirt cheap. And their consumers generally won't complain about sudden server reboots, because that's what expected for the price.
If they increase their prices, then many of their customers maybe better off just use Linode or DigitalOcean etc instead, as these vendors provides better guaranty on stability.
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 €25/month (price before VAT), plus the offer I got has a 2TB NVMe instead of the 1TB one.
Update: Fourplex (this host) uses a 1GB minimum.
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.
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.
- 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.
It goes on about DSL and dial-up for some reason?
And yes VPS providers are affected by ram shortage. Turns out things that need ram are affected by ram shortages. 5 stars for the insight
For context, I think I have recently been part of the lowendbox community and discussing things with providers etc.
Recently one of their providers actually cited the price increase directly to ram increase.
I was in talks with other VPS providers one of whom literally shared me a photo in the forum of what it costs them to get ram in their area.
I have been in talks with many many people within the VPS community and I have said this so many ocuntless times in here or lowendtalk (you can read my comments although I used to say this ~1 month ago iirc)
Heck, I wanted to build my own cloud. My father works in the bandwidth business (essentially you can say broadband/wifi)for ~10-15 years/ has very strong ties in it.
I on the other hand like/love tinkering with software side of things including virtualization and have made projects about it. I shared some request one month ago to talk to my dad and he said he was interested in datacenter idea
But I shit you not, it literally doesn't make sense even though A) my father has its own office, b) he can get essentially lots of bandwidth for free, C) we live in country with very cheap electricity comparative to many others.
And even if you have lots of hardwares, it doesn't just make sense to still have it if the price of replacement has increased so much far far.
There is also a forum called lowendspirit and I saw someone shut down their service citing this as well.
There are many posts on lowendbox (in which I have talked to) talking about the same thing as well
Simply I don't know how to state it, but the 4x price increase within ram simply literally didn't make sense. No thanks. I (or we?) are gonna wait the AI bubble or do something else/work more on software sides/just relax instead of making this.
I haven't even read the post but this is the most connected post I have felt in a long time!
To be really honest, I will admit that right now, personally I am either looking at mac 512 gb ultra or something which are still not ramflated from what I can tell or something or to be really honest, most cloud providers are burning money to not create a frenzy or still have pricing the same.
Personally, I love small cloud providers but recent times indiciate to me to favour stability. I have a netcup server myself but hetzner is an absolute love too from what i can tell and I can recommend any & OVH is another brilliant solution. All European.
Because these have/probably have large supplies. Soo like I know that OVH literally creates their own machiens, buys land and does everything and is a stock company so they are kind of a capital expenditure -> getting maximal profits machine in some sense (like yknow eliminating as much as middleman as possible kind of thing?) soo I guess the chances of OVH has lots of money to burn through to survive & brand reputation is crucial too and usually many of these run Black friday sometimes too
I guess another part is that most cloud providers can offset the losses right now for the hardware which can get cheap when the AI hardware bubble bursts but I odn't really know. I guess OVH or others might internally discuss this possibility too.
Atleast for me, I am gonna build software regarding the projects. I have found a huge disprecancy where whmcs and others have an almost monopoly so I am probably gonna spend a few months creating an open source project alternative (technically I already have a preview working with gvisor which I used with my netcup vps itself because gvisor can work in kvm machines itself not requiring nested kvm)
To be honest, shit's really hit the fan in this industry in ways that I can't tell. I have/had been in talks with an UK provider (https://xhosts.uk) [promoting because seems like a good guy] & he said that he's suffering the losses/takin...
as always: imho (!)
idk ... the article is like ... comparing apples with oranges:
telecommunication-networks and similar kind of infrastructure are also called "natural monopolies"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
and often those monopolies where (initially) build with public funding.
i don't think these characteristics apply to DRAM/semiconductor related facilities as we have them today.
i think the only "thing" which could "save us" from our own and the DRAM manufactures "greed" are new factories ... anywhere, but right now china looks "the most promising" at least to me.
additionally: i think these articles could be seen as somewhat related
"TSMC Risk"
* https://stratechery.com/2026/tsmc-risk/
and
"The Benefits of Bubbles"
* https://stratechery.com/2025/the-benefits-of-bubbles/
in a nutshell: the "upside" / result if the ongoing AI bubble pops could be
1. more semiconductor facilities
2. more power-generation facilities
cheers a..z
I've personally built a smart watch that connects to the internet, helps me perform organisation duties, all whilst running (micro-)Python, in far less RAM. To do the equivalent on desktop would require some form of sandboxed browser engine, JavaScript and some weird client-server stack.
I recently upgraded my servers with RackNerd from 768MB to 1GB because it was near free to do so, but I didn't need that extra memory. Before anybody claims they don't do anything, these servers deal with thousands of users a day.
I'm cautiously hoping that we start to see a period of optimisation again. There is currently zero incentivize to optimise anything any more, even if it negatively affects the end user.