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Allowed to make swap at VPS's at the cost of your own HDD space?
See title. I am curious if you are allowed to use up your own HDD space in order to create swap (or increase swap if one is available already). This is a general question btw, not a specific provider in mind. If you must know a provider (an example), I'll go with vmbox.co.
Some providers don't add swap to the plan, so I was curious if you can do this on your own.
Comments
I haven't tried but I don't see why not. Swap is just a repartitioning of disks.
They can't stop you (possibly on openvz you can...) but if you swap heavily you may get labelled an IO abuser...
Yes this works. I've confirmed this with BuyVM before. Their smallest KVM plan doesn't have enough RAM to run a yum update on a fresh centos install. I added my own swap partition (1gb) and boom it worked.
@francisco might be able to chime in if this has changed (either the default templates include swap or things work out of the box)
Yeah there should be no reason for this to be a problem for the host as long as you are using it for the right reasons, if it because you don't have enough ram 90% of the time that is the wrong reason, swap is disk based and not a ram replacement, for big updates and occasional things it should be fine.
Maybe it's helpful to point out that you don't even need to repartition for this - you can make a swap file using a loop back device. linux.com/learn/tutorials/442430-increase-your-available-swap-space-with-a-swap-file
If you own the kernel, then you are free to add swap file / swap partition for your kernel to use.
In case you do not own the kernel (i.e. OpenVZ, LXC, docker), you have no chance.
New business plan: buy a 512MB VPS, add 32GB swap file, sell 64x2GB VPSes, enjoy hookers & blow.
Same concept, but on a dedicated server, has already been done lots of times.
An oldie but goodie: