Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

fourplex.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 260 posts

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#111

Post by direwolf20 »

neelc wrote: post #73
xmcp123 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much better prices, and simplicity. The power you get from Hetzner or Kimsufi is crazy compared to AWS. If I need to host something small, I don’t want to mess around with the many permissions and quirks that are required to deal with AWS. It is often much easier to just setup the server on a standalone service.

This. When I worked at Microsoft, I seldom used Azure for personal use due to it being expensive and complicated. Whereas I have plenty of Fourplex.net servers because even on half the salary, it's affordable enough for 16 Tor exit relays and two personal web/email/Mastodon servers.

How's the legal exposure of running 16 exit relays?

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#112

Post by direwolf20 »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #17
saidinesh5 wrote: post #3

Out of curiosity, what advantages do the small VPS hosts offer compared to the big 3 (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)? Customer Service? Pricing? Local Data Center?

If the only thing you need is "server, accessible via the internet, always online", and you're not interested in all the vendor lock-in masquerading as useful services offered by the big cloud providers, then small VPS hosts are 100% the way to go. For mid-sized servers they're cheaper (i.e., stuff that wouldn't be free on the big clouds, but not "I want a petaflop"), with more transparent pricing (I pay $12, every m…

If you need a lot of power you should also look into dedicated servers from small hosts, they usually have very good power to cost ratios.

The set of companies that sell VPS and the set of companies that sell dedicated servers aren't the same set.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#113

Post by direwolf20 »

graemep wrote: post #33
saidinesh5 wrote: post #3

Out of curiosity, what advantages do the small VPS hosts offer compared to the big 3 (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)? Customer Service? Pricing? Local Data Center?

Low cost, simplicity and customer service. AWS does offer Lightsail which is similar pricing.

The terms of use of Lightsail say you can't use it in a way that's intended to reduce your costs over EC2. So they have more free bandwidth, but you're not allowed to intentionally send your traffic through Lightsail to avoid the extortion of EC2 bandwidth pricing. They have cheaper CPU, but you're not allowed to use 100% of your CPU.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#114

Post by altcognito »

dijit wrote: post #90
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 mis…

I don't think people really understand how big of a wall outside of GPU/TPUs the CPU, ram and even flash market has hit. We're paying as much if not more for the same stuff we were buying 4-5 years ago.

I do think we're more efficient and matrix operations are better (again, GPU/TPUs), but by and large, the computer hardware world has stopped exponential growth.

The period from 1990 to 2005 was amazing. Both in transistor counts and clock speed, it seemed like we were nearly *doubling* performance with every new generation. Memory and disk space had similar gains.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#115

Post by direwolf20 »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #65
saidinesh5 wrote: post #3

Out of curiosity, what advantages do the small VPS hosts offer compared to the big 3 (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)? Customer Service? Pricing? Local Data Center?

The only advantage is cheapness, for personal use. If you’re a government agency or a company you don’t care about saving $14/month, you want a secure provider. And these hosts are not secure, you’re basically just on your own.

If you're a government agency or anyone for whom a security failure costs more than sending an apology letter, you should really have your equipment in a locked rack, if not on prem.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#116

Post by direwolf20 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #36
saidinesh5 wrote: post #3

Out of curiosity, what advantages do the small VPS hosts offer compared to the big 3 (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)? Customer Service? Pricing? Local Data Center?

Small VPS hosts oversell like crazy and they offer much lower prices. Also their reliability might be worse, because they don't migrate VM between hosts.

Some. Depends on your needs though, and the provider. You can get shit performance for cheap, you can also get good performance for cheaper than AWS.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#117

Post by direwolf20 »

stephenr wrote: post #42
saidinesh5 wrote: post #3

Out of curiosity, what advantages do the small VPS hosts offer compared to the big 3 (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)? Customer Service? Pricing? Local Data Center?

Others have mentioned the general pricing, simplicity etc. Outbound data pricing is a potentially huge saving. AWS is as much as $90/TB outbound with 1GB free. Hetzner is $1.20/TB (in EU and US) with 1TB/20TB (US/EU) free. (Good) Smaller places are more likely to have actual technical staff you can talk to.

I have a dedicated server at one provider with $0.30/TB overage, and it's that cheapest I've ever seen. This provider appears to optimize for bandwidth–heavy use, advertising their connectivity heavily.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#118

Post by direwolf20 »

drnick1 wrote: post #14
saidinesh5 wrote: post #3

Out of curiosity, what advantages do the small VPS hosts offer compared to the big 3 (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)? Customer Service? Pricing? Local Data Center?

Where small VPS hosts can make a difference: require no KYC, accept crypto payments.

Some, but those are usually much more expensive to make up for the legal risk because half of their customers are doing something illegal.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#119

Post by direwolf20 »

gruturo wrote: post #55
saidinesh5 wrote: post #3

Out of curiosity, what advantages do the small VPS hosts offer compared to the big 3 (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)? Customer Service? Pricing? Local Data Center?

Predictable and extremely low costs for less critical stuff. My 2 main ones are respectively around 4 and 8 EUR per _year_. I use them to run wireguard to evade geoblocks when I'm travelling, a few redundant monitoring scripts alerting me of reachability issues of more critical stuff I care about, they serve as contingency access channels to my home (and home assistant) if my primary channels are down. I get no suppo…

And it's always that price, apart from bandwidth overage on some but not all providers.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#120

Post by Havoc »

This article looks like actual gibberish to me?

It goes on about DSL and dial-up for some reason?

And yes VPS providers are affected by ram shortage. Turns out things that need ram are affected by ram shortages. 5 stars for the insight

Post reply on HN