Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#211

Post by pjc50 » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 9:50 AM UTC

miyuru wrote: post #202

aitchnyu wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

GitHub is the main problem currently. Some software like composer does not work due to this. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 For countries, if you meaning connecting to VPS, lot of countries have good IPv6 connectivity now. For me both ISPs I use have native v6. This will differ from person to person. https://www.aelius.com/njh/google-ipv6/

It is inconcievably stupid that github, run by a massive tech company like Microsoft, has not migrated to ipv6. They're single-handedly holding back adoption.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#212

Post by ZenoArrow » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 10:07 AM UTC

anonym29 wrote: post #97

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…

>market that Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix are abandoning to chase the AI server market These three have collectively committed what, approaching $50B towards construction of new facilities and fabs in response to the demand? The memory industry has traditionally projected demand several years out and proactively scheduled construction and manufacturing to be able to meet the projected demand. The last time they did t…

> Sure, the new fabs won't be up and at volume production until late 2027 / early 2028, but committing tens of billions of dollars to new production facilities, including to facilities dedicated to DRAM rather than NAND or HBM, is hardly 'abandoning'.

Look at what happened to Crucial. Why would Micron axe it's whole consumer RAM division if it was just experiencing a temporary drop in DRAM supplies until new fabs were brought online? Samsung and SK Hynix may have changes in priorities in the coming years, and in the case of Samsung I'm sure they'll still make sure to supply sufficient DRAM chips for the devices it manufactures (phones, TVs, etc...) but Micron has made it's current intentions fairly clear. They'll probably work with OEMs, but they're unlikely to return to selling to the general public any time soon.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#213

Post by WJW » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 10:57 AM UTC

nebula8804 wrote: post #194

WJW wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Exactly as you'd expect: they make it possible to run the GPUs more hours in exchange for needing additional capital. Those batteries will have an upfront cost and will depreciate over time. You'll obviously also need more solar panels than before, which also further increases the upfront investment. Also note that now we're already straying away from the initial idea of "consuming free electricity from renewable overprovisioning". If you have solar panels and a battery, you can also just sell energy to the grid instead of trying to make last-gen GPUs profitable by reducing energy costs.

Again: it might work, if the math checks out for your specific source of secondhand GPUs and/or solar panels and/or batteries.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#214

Post by Orygin » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 10:59 AM UTC

matkoniecz wrote: post #205

filloooo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> die size is 40% bigger than Samsung likely naive question: why it is a problem? I would be fine if RAM in my PC has 10 times larger physical size if it is overall cheaper. I guess that larger may have more power draw, but given costs of RAM and electricity and power draw of RAM it sounds unlikely to be a problem. At a high end it would run into real-estate prices - at some point using half of room for computer stop…

For big PC towers it's not that big of a deal, but for smaller laptops, phones and SBC, having bigger chips may not be feasible due to size constraints

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#215

Post by 101008 » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 11:08 AM UTC

anonzzzies wrote: post #181

101008 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: how a person can provide VPS host srevices without being a reseller? Did you own the hardware? I am super interested. Hey, I even would pay for a series of articles about this!

I used to do site/vps hosting (millions of sites); we just bought slightly older 1U rack servers off ebay (and later our rack neighbour in the hosting room, who always had to buy the latest for his clients allowed us to buy of him) and kept filling local racks. We paid for a large bad quality bandwidth pipe for the large bandwidth eaters and good quality for the smaller traffic properties; we served some % of traffic…

Thanks for sharing, that sounds really interesting. I can understand why you are saying it's too much work (I imagined that).

If one day you want to write your memories, please let us all know! I am sure a few here would be more than excited to read about them!

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#216

Post by matt-p » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 11:11 AM UTC

In general terms I think that very small, very cheap hosts can use secondhand hardware, think DDR3/4 where RAM is still affordable. The 'Great' deals you see are mostly that. There are still $6/month for 2core/4GB VPS on EPYC if you need good performance (e.g example via https://serversearcher.com) but those types are unlikely to get any cheaper, for sure.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#217

Post by miyuru » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 11:47 AM UTC

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #141

direwolf20 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oversubscribe your hardware and you can do better. Most of your customers are idle most of the time.

Yea some cloud providers are notorious for it. Netcup does oversubscribe/overshare but not sooo much. I have a server there and I don't really observe too much but although I haven't really gotten ways to detect that stealing factor but there are definitely scripts to detect it, maybe I will run it some day but oh well the laziness. The most overshared vps provider I know is contabo. Literally search anything on redd…

Not to mention their network is over used/congested as well. there are constant IPv4 issues and IPv6 goes down for several days.

One of my client had dedicated servers in contabo and had to move to OVH because of it.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#218

Post by bArray » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 11:58 AM UTC

I think that poorly optimised software is killing small VPS hosts... We used to have very usable systems with less than 1MB of RAM.

I've personally built a smart watch that connects to the internet, helps me perform organisation duties, all whilst running (micro-)Python, in far less RAM. To do the equivalent on desktop would require some form of sandboxed browser engine, JavaScript and some weird client-server stack.

I recently upgraded my servers with RackNerd from 768MB to 1GB because it was near free to do so, but I didn't need that extra memory. Before anybody claims they don't do anything, these servers deal with thousands of users a day.

I'm cautiously hoping that we start to see a period of optimisation again. There is currently zero incentivize to optimise anything any more, even if it negatively affects the end user.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#219

Post by nirui » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 12:45 PM UTC

sschueller wrote: post #209

I and others are having the feeling this is actually a manufactured shortage to kill all remaining self and small hosters forcing them to move to the large cloud providers.

Unlikely. What's more likely is that they just simply don't care. They have turned this into an arms race now, killing off competitors is much more important than caring about coastal damage or even their own future.

But this does highlight the fact that most of our hardware is produced (and thus can be restricted) by a few cartel-like players, just like what's happened in the Internet industry.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#220

Post by nirui » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 1:07 PM UTC

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.

I doubt that.

Some dirt-cheap VPS maybe too unreliable to run anything serious, that's why they sell that for dirt cheap. And their consumers generally won't complain about sudden server reboots, because that's what expected for the price.

If they increase their prices, then many of their customers maybe better off just use Linode or DigitalOcean etc instead, as these vendors provides better guaranty on stability.