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1GB VPS - practical things to do (other than idling)
abytecurious
Member
in Help
Curious to find what type of workloads folks here use a 1GB VPS for. It is too small for a webserver that needs MySQL (e.g. your run of the mill Wordpress site). Static sites don't really drive any functionality, so while useful, it is easily something I can tack on to the other nodes that run Wordpress.
I recently found Beszel (https://beszel.dev/) - a lightweight uptime monitor, which looks pretty neat. Works well, but I see gaps in the graphs - I need to investigate if this is a problem due to running it on a low spec VPS or an application/end point problem.
Any other ideas on how to use 1GB VPSes?
Comments
nginx reverse proxy, wireguard, amneziaVPN (Xray, amneziaWG, Wireguard) (For personal vpn), tiny copyparty server, mini CDN server.
1Gb of ? , ram?
I am pretty sure it can handle WordPress efficiently (depends on hardware for sure) for some users concurrently
More to host you can do note keeping , basic telegram bots , proxy server, relay
Uptime Kuma to monitor your other 1GB VPS.
Bezel looks fancy, but is it really necessary? It looks like another potential attack vector.
Globalping probe
Jumpbox
I have got 256MB OVZ server and this is small
I run globalping there and a proxy.
MJJ Bot.
The Apollo 11 guidance system had only 3.75KB of RAM.
You can do a ton in 1GB of RAM. Debian 13 runs fine in 256MB of RAM. Most low-to-low-medium traffic PHP driven site with tuned MySQL will work fine with 1GB of RAM.
Vaultwarden for passwords, mox mailserver, vikunja for tasks, server monitoring as you said. There's plenty non bloated apps that you can run.
Icinga satellite to distribute checks
Hi!
Great question. I see a couple of great answers already but I wanted to mention that enabling zram could help you run services even if they technically require more RAM than available.
On Debian 13 it's really simple:
From now on, you'll have swap device added. Remove your existing swap or set it to lower priority to not interfere with zram. The zram should be much faster (both speed and latency) than traditional swap, since the data isn't written to the disk rather kept in RAM (even if it says swap), just compressed.
If you want to check how fast zstd algorithm can compress the data on your server, run:
If the number seems low, there are also other (possibly faster) compression algorithms such as lzo or lz4 available.
Personally, I mostly run relays (syncthing, tor, i2p) and a couple of static sites on my idlers, this works perfectly well even on 1GB. I'm pretty sure wordpress or most other php apps (with mariadb) should be able to run well in this scenario too.
Gotify + Uptime Kuma is a good use case for 1GB RAM VPS. I like having those two off my main production servers, because if they go down, and Gotify and Uptime Kuma are running on them, then I don't get notifications and it kinda defeats the purpose.
I use a free Oracle VPS and use Podman to deploy both of them. Works great for me.
Join DN42 - it's fun. Or make it your IRC bouncer.
Or host a website. You used to be able to do that on Windows 98, which didn't even let you have 1GB of RAM.
Wordpress, LinkStack static landing page, http proxy, Wireguard, Nebula vpn lighthouse, Shlink url shortner, Zipline for file/image sharing, Syncthing relay, tang+clevis to auto-unlock your LUKS drives.
For about twenty years I had a rather large website on a (managed) dedicated server with 256MB RAM (and 20 or 80GB HDD disk, don't remember)
(I upgraded the RAM once from 128 to 256 and in the end to 512MB).
Looking back (esp. the last years the server was still running) I really can say kudos to the sysadmins at that provider that took care of the server.
(Btw, not one hardware failure in about 20 years).
So true. Low-end isn't only about the price, it's about getting the max out of the bare minimum of resources. I must admit I cancelled my last remaining 128mb vm as it was getting a bitch to maintain but I still have a couple of 256 boxes rocking it!
Wow! So many great answers. Will try gotify, vikunja and uptime kuma. Jump box also sounds good.
@czed - it works similar to how Hetrixtools does, with an agent running on the actual VPS and data sent to my dashboard. What attack vector do you see? (Could probably add firewall rules and drop packets from IP addresses I don’t have the agents on)
@oloke zram looks great. Will try that as well. Maybe will make a difference when running Wordpress
@woinokiz I setup a basic lemp and it would go down once so very often. (I usually install Centminmod, but that needs atleast 2GB)
I'm running CloudPanel for most of my websites that doesn't need fancy Docker.
Folding
Just curious, how much ram it consume on idle?
i just added my 15 idlers to globalping, thanks for suggesting 👍
Make a website. Don't use Wordpress - it's not MySQL, it's Wordpress itself that's terrible. Make your own website from scratch with HTML or PHP.
Run YABS every 30 minutes on cron job, with an automated script to submit a ticket to the provider if the disk or CPU benchmarks drop.
You can also add them to ntppool.org. It needs very little memory and you can adjust load for your machine depending on your CPU and bandwidth allowance.
its says they only want people with "long-term-commitment" and ill probably ditch some of these idlers soon
Yeah, it's the best for yearly offers (the classic $7/y) or at least several months.
run a lightwight container to support globalping.io
docker run -d -e GP_ADOPTION_TOKEN=m5ier355b6ecyixvoy3hkwvjd7qq35bv --log-driver local --network host --restart=always --name globalping-probe globalping/globalping-probe
When we first started our business, our website ran on a 256M VPS at LiteServer. Now it expands to a big system with more than 20K users. Of course we cannot run it on the 256M VPS anymore, but it's the proof that a small VPS can be a starting point for a big thing.
Have you compared zstd to lz4? I believe zstd has a lower compression ratio than lz4 but I haven't tested it. Wondering if you have. BTW, great post and info.
hmm is this some sort of ragebait ? it gotta be