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Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

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Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#81

Post by zeagle »

sekh60 wrote: post #77
zeagle wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until recently I had a 4gb ram 80gb ssd+2tb hd VPS running debian in a Montreal data centre with a real use 700 mbit pipe to my city with a budget provider for the equivalent of $80USD/year. When fio speeds were slow they moved me to a less crowded server. I gave it up as don't need it and moved my personal sites back to NFS for peanuts a year and services to my NAS. The pricing, offsite storage for my backups, Canad…

Canadian here, could you share the name of the provider? I'd love to move to something more local and just need a basic small vps for a simple apache host. I know of a couple providers but never talked to anyone actually using one.

It was ServaRICA as someone else suggested. It was a Black Friday hybrid VPS deal from a few years ago, looks like they still have comparable stuff on their site. For the cost I would generally assume anything important needs to be duplicated in case the company folds or a fire unless you pay them for such a service. (I don't have any vested interest in suggesting them.)

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#82

Post by zozbot234 »

filloooo wrote: post #74
ZenoArrow wrote: post #4

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 ma…

Their scale is simply too small to affect the market outside China, majority of their chips will be eaten up by HBM3 production with yet unknown yield rate. They are forbidden to buy foreign equipment beyond their current process node, which is already obsolete, die size is 40% bigger than Samsung, not to mention lithography, the big 3 are using EUV while they are stuck with lobotomized DUV. They can start making som…

Obsolete process node hardly matters when the rest of the market is bottlenecked on production capacity; small overall scale still might. Expanding capacity may or may not make sense; it depends on your prediction of the way the market will go.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#83

Post by conductr »

croes wrote: post #47
conductr wrote: post #24

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.

At a certain price people choose not to buy

Sure, the market may shrink some but it's also relative to alternatives that are also increasing. There's no advice in the article the market is shrinking or that pricing is causing it to. People leaving the market on this type of cost will likely be people that have VPS's as idle resources, like some forgotten subscription they don't use but never canceled because it's The comparison to 2000s telcom market does not seem similar at all to me.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#85

Post by actionfromafar »

bee_rider wrote: post #59
actionfromafar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out their wind "opercapacity" maybe isn't. Maybe they are trading chip efficiency for raw power.

Something I’ve been sort of wondering about—LLM training seems like it ought to be the most dispatchable possible workload (easy to pause the thing when you don’t have enough wind power, say). But, when I’ve brought this up before people have pointed out that, basically, top-tier GPU time is just so valuable that they always want to be training full speed ahead. But, hypothetically if they had a ton of previous gen G…

I think as such intermittent power comes on the grid in the coming decades, people will find creative uses for it.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#87

Post by zozbot234 »

bee_rider wrote: post #59
actionfromafar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out their wind "opercapacity" maybe isn't. Maybe they are trading chip efficiency for raw power.

Something I’ve been sort of wondering about—LLM training seems like it ought to be the most dispatchable possible workload (easy to pause the thing when you don’t have enough wind power, say). But, when I’ve brought this up before people have pointed out that, basically, top-tier GPU time is just so valuable that they always want to be training full speed ahead. But, hypothetically if they had a ton of previous gen G…

> top-tier GPU time is just so valuable that they always want to be training full speed ahead.

I don't think this makes much sense because the "waste" of hardware infrastructure by going from 99.999% duty cycle to 99% is still only ~1%. It's linear in the fraction of forgone capacity, while the fraction of power costs you save from simply shaving off the costliest peaks and shifting that demand to the lows is superlinear.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#89

Post by direwolf20 »

filloooo wrote: post #74
ZenoArrow wrote: post #4

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 ma…

Their scale is simply too small to affect the market outside China, majority of their chips will be eaten up by HBM3 production with yet unknown yield rate. They are forbidden to buy foreign equipment beyond their current process node, which is already obsolete, die size is 40% bigger than Samsung, not to mention lithography, the big 3 are using EUV while they are stuck with lobotomized DUV. They can start making som…

They will grow exponentially and catch the western market unawares in 10-15 years with a sudden flood of cheap, effective chips. Just like everything else China makes. Electric vehicles for example.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#90

Post by dijit »

direwolf20 wrote: post #88

RAM is still cheaper than 10 years ago. Every time you ask "are RAM prices killing X?" ask yourself if we had X 10 years ago.

I'm not sure this holds up when you look at the actual numbers. In 2016, you could get a DDR4-2400 16GB kit for $81 [1], and a comparable G.SKILL Ripjaws V kit was around $52 [2]. Today (January 2026), that same G.SKILL kit costs $105-146 [3], and most 16GB DDR4 kits are running $95-150 [4]. So RAM is actually more expensive now than it was 10 years ago, not cheaper.

The "did we have X 10 years ago" argument also misses a a lot of modern software requirements. Yes, we had mid-range laptops and budget gaming PCs in 2016, but the memory footprint of everyday applications has exploded since then. Electron-based apps (Slack, Teams, VS Code, Discord) routinely consume 500MB-1GB+ each [5], and it's entirely normal to have multiple running simultaneously. A typical "light" workload in 2026 easily uses 2-3x the RAM that a comparable workflow needed in 2016.

So we're getting squeezed from both sides: applications demand more memory whilst memory itself costs more. An 8GB laptop was perfectly serviceable for office work in 2016; in 2026, it's borderline unusable with a few Chrome tabs and Teams open. The same kit that cost $55 in June 2025 now costs $150 [2, again]. That's a 150%+ increase in six months, pushing capable systems out of reach for budget-conscious users precisely when software bloat is making RAM more essential than ever.

[1] https://gamersnexus.net/industry/3212-ram-price-investigatio... [2] https://gamersnexus.net/news/ram-wtf [3] https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=ddr4+ram+8gb [4] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ [5] https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/

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