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

241–250 of 260 posts

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#241

Post by direwolf20 »

101008 wrote: post #173
neelc wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I previously ran another VPS host who did the same exact thing (before OVH did it?). Unlike Fourplex.net which uses modern ASRock Ryzen 9000 servers, Qeru.net used older HPE DL360 Gen9 servers. I gave 3GB of RAM for $3-4/mo then. But these servers weren't very fast. I ended up selling the business, and am happy I did.

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!

Abuse complaints come to the IP address owner. If you have your own IP addresses, you don't need to worry about having your vendor terminate your account for abuse.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#242

Post by fjordofnorway »

filloooo wrote: post #190
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.

DRAM rarely break, yes, I have bought cottage industry recycled DDR3 with no problem whatsoever. The problem, however, is IO controller support has been dropped, many new CPUs don't even support DDR4 any more, especially mobile ones.

The market seems to stay strange because few believe it can stay strange, but looking back at the netbook industry I feel like a few losers at keeping up for the AI level will realize they may as well make the products that people prefer old prices for and start resuming anything that can bring total system costs down.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#243

Post by graemep »

pinkgolem wrote: post #234
graemep wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

You have never seen a small business then. A local shop is not spending $10k to host their website. Lots of VPS hosts have products aimed at this market so it must he significant in aggregate.

My point is small businesses tend to be owner managed and therefore more cost sensitive and the costs are still not a significant factor. AS businesses get bigger its even less significant and its other people's money.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#244

Post by fjnfnrnfn »

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…

That is simply not true, Linux boots just fine with 8 MiB without MMU these days, which is half of the system memory I had available in 1995

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#245

Post by ZenoArrow »

direwolf20 wrote: post #238
ZenoArrow wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

What makes you think consumers would want to trust them again after they were abandoned previously? Consumers would rather vote with their wallets for companies that are going to continue giving them good deals. The only reason Micron has a chance to pivot back to consumer RAM is because there's not much competition, but that could change if the Chinese RAM manufacturers can make inroads into western markets and continue their rapid technological growth.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#246

Post by nirui »

conductr wrote: post #227
nirui wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m just making a market assumption that DO needs to raise their prices as well. Everyone needs RAM. Not sure what the lift might be, but in theory everything should be relatively similar in future state, just more expensive. This is basically a form of inflation.

Not sure about that too, the market is just too delicate at current moment.

People renting VPS to do something, running a service, a website, email etc. But there are other ways to achieve the same without the need of a VPS.

If VPS cost increase to a certain level, some people will just host the service on their own Raspberry Pis through Cloudflare Tunnel, or just simply shut the service down.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#247

Post by ben_w »

direwolf20 wrote: post #239
pjc50 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I doubt "extremely interested" is the reason.

There may indeed be some tracking that MS does via IPv4, but it's not a good way to do it.

I suspect any such tracking is essentially just some cruft that snuck in (either their own or legislative) in the early 2000s, and nobody thinks it's their problem to make go away.

That said, that IPv4 is a poor way to do tracking doesn't guarantee there's no manager demanding it: any corporation eventually gets someone with no technical knowledge demanding bad solutions.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#248

Post by pinkgolem »

graemep wrote: post #243
pinkgolem wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You have never seen a small business then. A local shop is not spending $10k to host their website. Lots of VPS hosts have products aimed at this market so it must he significant in aggregate. My point is small businesses tend to be owner managed and therefore more cost sensitive and the costs are still not a significant factor. AS businesses get bigger its even less significant and its other people's money.

A local business is not using AWS usually but shoppify or Odo or whatever hosting provider provides a management wp.

And at least here in Germany, they are nickel an dimming on the hosting cost.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#249

Post by k4rli »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #138
Tiberium wrote: post #44

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…

With SEPA payments there hasn't been need to log into customercontrolpanel for me. No cut for Stripe either so the money stays in Europe.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#250

Post by direwolf20 »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #245
direwolf20 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What makes you think consumers would want to trust them again after they were abandoned previously? Consumers would rather vote with their wallets for companies that are going to continue giving them good deals. The only reason Micron has a chance to pivot back to consumer RAM is because there's not much competition, but that could change if the Chinese RAM manufacturers can make inroads into western markets and cont…

Because there isn't room for reputation here. The RAM works, or it doesn't. It costs a certain price. Do you want to spend more money, or less money?
Post reply on HN