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Built a Gamified, Intent-Driven, AI-Assisted E-commerce on a 1GB VM — Would Appreciate Your Feedback
Hey everyone,
Thank you for accepting me here. This is actually my first post on LowEndTalk, so I thought I'd share a project I recently finished and get some feedback from people with experience running applications on low-resource servers.
I recently built an e-commerce MVP for a small bakery client.
The project is a gamified, intent-driven, AI-assisted e-commerce storefront with a custom CMS.
The interesting part for me was seeing how much functionality I could run while keeping the infrastructure relatively small.
Current setup:
- GCP e2-micro — 1GB RAM
- Next.js storefront
- Django / Django Ninja backend
- FastAPI-based AI/intent layer
- SQLite
- Meilisearch
- Nginx
- Custom vanilla-JS CMS
For the MVP, I deliberately avoided adding infrastructure unless I felt there was an actual requirement for it.
No Kubernetes, no microservices everywhere, no Redis, no Celery, and no CDN.
The AI assistant
The storefront has an assistant called Tindera.
I didn't want it to be just another chatbot where everything is sent to an LLM and we hope for the best.
The basic idea is:
User request → intent recognition → application action
For example, the assistant can understand what the customer is trying to do and route the request toward things such as product search, navigation, or other storefront actions.
The LLM is only one component of the system. I don't fully trust an LLM to make application decisions on its own, so the application controls what actions are actually available.
Why Next.js?
This will probably be one of the questions. 😄
Yes, I could have built a lot of the frontend with vanilla JS.
The main reason I chose Next.js was SSR. When I considered the effort involved in building and maintaining the SSR/frontend infrastructure myself versus the additional framework/runtime overhead, Next.js seemed like a reasonable tradeoff for this project.
The 1GB VM is mainly an MVP/testing environment. The intended production environment would be around 4–8GB RAM, so I'm not trying to claim that 1GB is the ideal production size for this application.
What I'm interested in hearing from you guys
I wanted to see how far I could push a small VM before adding infrastructure simply because it's commonly recommended.
It actually worked better than I expected.
So I'd really appreciate feedback from people here who have experience running real workloads on low-resource VPSes.
I'm more interested in practical experience than theoretical architecture.
The goal wasn't to use the fewest technologies possible. It was more about finding a reasonable balance between development effort, runtime overhead, maintenance, and actual workload.
Anyway, I'm new here, so I'd genuinely appreciate any criticism or suggestions. 😄
Demo: http://34.68.53.234/
Demo credentials: demo / demo
Project / showcase: https://github.com/j1rDery/aireenshop-showcase
Comments
herewegoagain.gif
Hello, https://34.68.53.234/ is broken, please fix
wow
Thanks for checking! The demo is currently HTTP only, so please use http://34.68.53.234/ rather than HTTPS. HTTPS isn't configured on this MVP/test VM yet.
Please use let's encrypt cert for IP address
How about A Distributed Denial of Service
Holy ip address
Please use positive language.
Performance ValidationLET should add a new "slop" section atp.
Sorry, I guess I may have posted this in the wrong place/thread. 😅 I was mainly looking for feedback on the application architecture and engineering tradeoffs rather than the deployment/security side of the demo. Anyways, thanks for the comments
You are a talentless slop director
But does it store SSH keys?