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What’s the smallest VPS you’ve actually found useful in production?
Let's cut the fluff and get real. We all see those bargain-basement VPS offers, but is a 512MB RAM server actually good for anything beyond a personal blog?
I'm curious to hear about the absolute smallest VPS you've used for a real, live, and revenue-generating project. Don't tell me what's "technically possible"—tell me what you've actually run without wanting to pull your hair out.
What were the specs? What did you build? And how did it hold up when it mattered?
Comments
IONOS €1 euro vps very stable for years
The smaller machine when we initially deployed push-ups in 2020 was VirMach KVM with 384MB RAM and 20GB SSD.
It was $4/year but we cancelled it because it only has 100GB monthly bandwidth allowance.
Technical article: The Reality of NDN Video Streaming
Nowadays we have some 1GB for BGP or DMCA ignor or storage, otherwise it’s 2GB minimum and 4GB preferred.
I'm using 512MB Lightsail for Redis sentinel nodes watching master and replicas.
2vcpu/2ram
some days ago, i set up a vps with 128MB memory ,512MB disk, only for a vpn software, its enough, and i can use it from time to time
16GB 4 vcore Ryzen VDS
Depends on tech Stack,
I was able to handle a lot of users with js stack (NextJs, mongo db , nodejs )
On 1c:1g vps (yes some swap for backup)
Not a VPS but I used to run mailman and sendmail of a NSLU2 (the slug NAS) with 32MB RAM that lived under my staircase. It hosted a mailing list with about 1000 members and about 100 messages per day at it's peak. Needed to customise the batch mail send to drip feed mails into the queue so that multiple invocations of sendmail wouldn't end up using up all the RAM and causing it to swap wildly.
Worked well for a couple of years, but then the USB flash drive it was on died, and I decided it wasn't work the effort needed getting a it working again,.That was probably a 4GB or 8GB USB flash drive back when that was still considered quite a lot!
128MB-256MB will easily run a Nginx/PHP site.
Running https://dotst.st and porting over the other sites (dotVG.vg, dotGD.gd, dotGL.gl, etc) to the same box soon.
Currently idling at 150Mb~ RAM but I could get it less than 128MB if I wanted to disable things like opcache, fail2ban and tweak nginx a bit more.
Debian 13, 6.16.1-x64v3-xanmod1, nginx/1.26.3, PHP 8.4.11 w/ Zend OPcache v8.4.11. Box still runs UFW, Fail2Ban, and snmpd.
I have no idea what people use big VPSes for.
Netcup's, 1Eur/Month VPS for Monitoring and gotify.
The smallest VPS I am running currently is 512mb kvm from og buyvm running a proxy node for a couple of clients who are again a mess to deal with. Also with sloudzy takeover of buyvm from fran the future is undefined.
My smallest VPS currently is:
2 x Ryzen 9 5950X
2 GB RAM
20 GB storage
1€ / month
LowHosting
:D
It works pretty cool, had it since 2023. My other one is about twice the specs.
Some actual current examples taken from actual live instances that have been running for some time. I think these stats are useful, as it gives an indication of actual memory used (MiB Mem: total - MiB Swap: avail Mem), how much RAM gets used as swap over the long term, and also how much swap space has used (give a good idea of peak memory use).
These aren't VPS as such, they're VMs on my dedis. Also specified the size I'd feel confident resizing these down to, allowing some spare swap headroom for boot-time and any random other tasks.
My primary DNS server (128MB RAM + 128MB swap would be sufficient):
My primary e-mail server (256MB + 256MB swap would be sufficient):
My origin static web server (128MB RAM + 128MB swap would be sufficient):
My primary static web server (256MB RAM + 256MB swap would be sufficient):
My primary haproxy (others are similar, 512MB RAM + 512MB swap would be sufficent):
One of my web-app nodes (1GB RAM + 512MB swap sufficient), maybe fine on 512MB RAM + 512MB swap):
Actual VPS, secondary mail server, public DNS (512MB + 512MB swap sufficient):
it's running normally
used a ramnode with 128mb ram.
mikr.us, but dont know if its realiable.
using 11euro yearly alexhost vps for reverse proxy and running some website which makes monthly around 60-90$ from ads. undoubtedly, most profitable ever.