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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?

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, even if the market bursts, prices are already inflated. RAM manufacturers know that everything 5xed and they aren't likely going to rush out and drop the price levels to pre-expansion. Once the AI market bursts, you can expect slow and methodical decreases in price (if any). And that will ultimately buy China a lot of time to shove their ram into the market cutting ram manufacturers out of most non-US m…

Graphic cards prices normalized quite quickly after crypto boom. Before going nuts for AI training of course.

>Graphic cards prices normalized quite quickly after crypto boom

Eh, I don't think we were on the same planet then. Even post crypto pre-AI GPUs were far more expensive than they were before said crypto. We just got used to paying $1000 for a mid tier cards.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't. I gave up on waiting and switched to starlink. The existence of starlink provides even less financial reward for for paying to wire up my house.

I'm not saying for you personally it is financially viable. I am saying that these companies have zero excuse to say that providing that service to every single American isn't financially viable. They were already paid to do that, and simply took the money and didn't provide the service. We could still hold them to account if there was any political will to do so.

It's hard for the economics not to work out.

It might be an eye popping number that it costs $3k to run optic fiber to a rural house but the service costs $100 a month and brings in $3600 in revenue in 3 years. The fiber is likely to be good for 50+ years so they only way this is not "financially viable" is that capital is saving it's powder to invest in bubbles. That is, we are already living in an "Atlas Shrugged" world where capital demands unreasonably high rates of return on investment for physical world investments.

I was reading an article in The Economist about how China would like to have its own Starlink but has the problem that it was not shy to invest in fiber so it has already cannibalized its own domestic market and foreign markets either don't trust China or are too poor.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#233

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…

> 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.

And? That's good enough. My daily driver desktop, which I use to do development, plus play a few games (FC5, Dirt Rally, etc) has 16GB DDR3.

For 90% of computers in use today, including laptops, that RAM you call obsolete is fine.

Users aren't going to complain that a document which takes 3s to open now takes 3.5s

What you need as far as RAM goes, to make the computer perform acceptably is capacity. Users get a bigger performance boost by going from 8GB RAM to 16GB Ram and from 16GB Ram to 32 GB RAM than from DDR3 to DDR4 or from DDR4 to DDR5.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#234
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're selling all their capabilities; using them as a VPS is like using a battleship to cut cheese. But if all you really do with cloud stuff is "ssh into a server I have" (which covers a ton!) then you'll find much cheaper/more performant elsewhere.

> They're selling all their capabilities; using them as a VPS is like using a battleship to cut cheese. A lot of people do it. People feel the battleship is safe and familiar. For most businesses the extra cost is not even noticed. Even a small business spending $500/month on hosting instead of $50 is not going to notice. Also, if something goes wrong (e.g. your AWS region goes down) its far easier to explain to a ma…

To be fair, i have never seen a business with a 500$ monthly cloud bill, AWS seems to start around 10k given or taken for a light production workload

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#235
post #64

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So with 8 customers per box (AMD EPYC™ 9645 CPU has 96 cores) if they have single-cpu boxes, that would need 256 GiB RAM. CPU launch price 11000 USD. RAM will likely be another 10000 USD 20000 / 8 customers / 40 USD/mo = 62 months just to recoup CPU and RAM let alone other components. Weird, whenever I napkin math offers of any HW for renting, I get that I could buy it myself in 1-2 years of rent. Sometimes faster. D…

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

Sure, but they specifically state it's "dedicated". So I guess it really is not, because price doesn't make sense otherwise.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a strategic opportunity for Intel, if they weren't run by imbeciles. DDR4 doesn't require the latest and greatest nodes. It's boring old technology. Even DDR5 is pretty boring. Intel could clean up fabbing DRAM (like they used to). But alas no. They're part of the semiconductor cartel and uninterested in the supply of DRAM increasing. Prices would drop and the fabs would only make stupid margins instead o…

Intel would be in the very same bind as every other DRAM producer who's trying to expand production today, only far worse because they have practically no experience fabbing DRAM compared to logic. (You can fab eDRAM on logic processes, but you'd only do that out of sheer desperation since the cost per bit is much higher.) What they could do very easily in this market is bring back frickin Optane and hook it up to a…

A recent development is High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) which works the same as HBM but uses less power and has far higher density.

If Intel made an equivalent high bandwidth Optane product, they’d immediately corner the GPU memory market.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#237
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Most of a chip is the packaging. The die can be bigger.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 wer…

What makes you think it won't start selling it as Micron brand or even Crucial brand once the bubble pops?

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#239
post #211
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The massivest companies are the stupidest. Do what you can to avoid all Microsoft products.

My theory: Microsoft is extremely interested in tracking you via your IPv4.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#240

I don't know if you can consider Netcup "small", but their RS 4000 G12 ("root server", basically a VPS with dedicated/guaranteed resources) costs ~€31 for a monthly contract for any location in Europe without VAT included. It's 12 dedicated cores of a modern EPYC CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe. I got that offer during their Black Friday sale and pay €25/month (price before VAT), plus the offer I got has a 2TB NVMe instead o…

I got a netcup 500 gb server 8 gigs ram 4v cpu and everything with my frugal nature with getting a 5 euro voucher and I was following/seeing their advent calendar too which offered 1 month free so for 3 months, I got 1 month free, another month with the 5 euro voucher and essentially only paid for the last month. I ended up paying 8$ in total for the 3 months. Although after the 3 months, I have to pay more around ~5…

Customer Control Panel. Netcup's control panels are stupid.
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