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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?

#191

Post by winrid »

dpedu wrote: post #62

While not a small host, I thought I would mention what I observed with OVH's VPS offering. I was considering their line of VPSes recently because of how generous the cores/ram quantities were given the price. For example, the smallest offering is 4 cores / 8GB at just over $4 a month. What I found is that it is cheap because the cores, and presumably ram, is old. Like, 2013 era Xeon E3-1275 v3 old. But that's fine! O…

OVH doesn't list the eco range on their site nav now, their servers start at $90/mo unless you search OVH eco and go directly to the page.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#192

Post by aitchnyu »

Gigachad wrote: post #160
direwolf20 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried doing ipv6-only plans?

Vultr has one that's $2.5/month v6 only. Probably good if you just need something tiny to run some automation.

What are the issues faced by v6-only hosts and are there countries where it is a non-issue?

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#193

Post by nebula8804 »

renewiltord wrote: post #184
mikestorrent wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I expect to happen. 2016's ram was good enough for consumers then and probably still is for a huge class of consumers now. I'd rather 32GB of DDR3 than 8gb of DDR5.

You can get like terabytes of DDR3 used. No one wants that shit. Too slow. Power hog.

This is where China's crazy solar advantage affects real day to day outcomes. When you have electric costs going into 6-8 cents per kwh then you can run older nodes that slurp more electricity. They aren't even done lowering the price. I've thought about this recently. If the dream of meterless electricity came to fruition then that terabytes of DDR3 could essentially be run until it literally burned out and then recycled back into its core components. The sun provides more power than the entirety of society could possibly currently use and so its a shame that the ram is being tossed instead of used.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#194

Post by nebula8804 »

WJW wrote: post #137
bee_rider wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

First: Almost anything can be profitable if you have free inputs. Second: Even solar and wind are not really "free" as the capital costs still depreciate over the lifetime of the plant. You might be getting the power for near-zero or even negative cost for a short while, but the power cost advantage will very quickly be competed away since it's so easy to spend a lot of energy. Even remelting recycled metals would ne…

They are amazing at making batteries as well. How does adding batteries to the mix change the calculation?

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#195

Post by t312227 »

hello,

as always: imho (!)

idk ... the article is like ... comparing apples with oranges:

telecommunication-networks and similar kind of infrastructure are also called "natural monopolies"

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

and often those monopolies where (initially) build with public funding.

i don't think these characteristics apply to DRAM/semiconductor related facilities as we have them today.

i think the only "thing" which could "save us" from our own and the DRAM manufactures "greed" are new factories ... anywhere, but right now china looks "the most promising" at least to me.

additionally: i think these articles could be seen as somewhat related

"TSMC Risk"

* https://stratechery.com/2026/tsmc-risk/

and

"The Benefits of Bubbles"

* https://stratechery.com/2025/the-benefits-of-bubbles/

in a nutshell: the "upside" / result if the ongoing AI bubble pops could be

1. more semiconductor facilities

2. more power-generation facilities

cheers a..z

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#196

Post by nottorp »

nh2 wrote: post #30
tokyobreakfast wrote: post #23

RAM shortage or competent programmer shortage? Can't get a Linux box to idle (or even install) under 512M these days. Can't find a web developer worth a shit who doesn't think he needs a Python backend application server to print "Hello, world" when you could do this with a static page served with something like OpenBSD with two-digit RAM requirements. It's not the RAM that's changed; it's everyone around the RAM. A…

My NixOS SSH jump host server here idles at 234 MB of which 64 MB is systemd-journald (which I assume can be reduced with some settings of how much to keep in RAM).

>which 64 MB is systemd-journald

Wait till they rewrite it in Rust!

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#197

Post by friendzis »

g-mork wrote: post #185
direwolf20 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried doing ipv6-only plans?

or just offer v4 HTTPS LB bundled. Never understood why more places didn't do this.

Responsibility and controls. If the host/dc assigns a dedicated addresses the contract can be essentially "the customer assumes all liability behind traffic". With NAT/LB you need at the very least quite robust, evidence-grade monitoring mechanisms tagging all traffic and keeping historical data. In practice, some for of active abuse prevention is required, otherwise huge chunk of your address space is going to effectively linger in blacklist limbo.

That is, if being unreachable below "presentation layer" is acceptable in the first place, but I guess the question kind of presupposes this.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#198

Post by stevefan1999 »

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?

A fixed plan that is not so flexible, not pay-as-you-go, but predictable and economical. Elastic cloud are elastic in terms of that you can change the compute you want, you can change the storage, either block or object, and you can use their premium network as much as you can, long as you have the money and got clearance on the end of the month. Scaling is therefore what those elastic cloud offers, albeit in a premium price.

Meanwhile, small service providers might not actually need those premium features, and just want something that is cheap and makes economical sense. They don't need the state-of-the-art hardware and just want something that works.

That's why while the AAGO (AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle) attracted a lot of big corpo, that is, almost all of Forbes 500s used them, DigitalOcean and Vultr, with their $5 plan, is those who won the small businesses.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#200

Post by ErroneousBosh »

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 can squeeze out a bit more performance if they are ready to go beyond their current node using only domestic equipment and be blacklisted by the US government.

Which suits the rest of the world just fine. More for the rest of us, and if the single-digit-percent portion of their market that the US represents wants to lock itself out, no skin off anyone else's nose.

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