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Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

fourplex.net

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Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#251
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For providers like us, we have to lease IPv4. We came long after IPv4 was already depleted. IPv4 prices did go down. Despite that, the $15/year 128MB BuyVM plan is long-gone. But for a new provider like us, we'd have to spend more than an established player like BuyVM or RackNerd who bought most of their servers pre-AI-boom.

Have you tried doing ipv6-only plans?

Yeah, most services will be behind a CDN or firewall service, anyway.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#252

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…

This is the classic commodities cycle, and it happens everywhere in an economy where aggregate supply is inelastic in the short term but aggregate demand can fluctuate quickly. The reason it’s coming for DRAM first is that memory is the closest part to a pure interchangeable commodity and that recent process nodes have had almost zero improvement to memory density for years now, despite logic density continuing to increase exponentially. That and these companies have been known to fix prices in the past, but in this case the evidence suggests it’s a large aggregate demand shock.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is definitely some room for reputation in the enthusiast/direct-to-consumer market.

Crucial had one of the best marketing positions in the business:

- They had a captive supply chain. There was no risk they'd switch from Samsung to Hynix chips but keep the same SKU, so you could buy a second set later and expect it to have similar timings.

- They had a reputation for being conservative about their offerings. There's a lot of RAM out there that meets rated timings only with a voltage right on the edge of what the memory controllers will start to burn out at.

- They were on a lot of mainboard manufacturer's qualification lists, and yet were easily obtained (at least in the US). There are a fair number of brands and ranges that simply aren't widely distributed.

So they were in a place to say "we can charge 10% more for confidence", and considering enthusiasts willingly pay 30% more for RGB and fancy heatspreaders, that's not a bad message. I mean, I've had competent results with plenty of other brands (I have a Team set in my main rig, and it replaced a G.Skill one before the RAMpocalypse), but I always thought of Crucial as a brand you'd use if you were building a machine for work or a family member and didn't want to deal with surprises.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#254
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not difficult, you just need to run `htop` and perform addition of the RES column (which is in KB unless a unit is shown). Example: USER RES▽ Command root 70436 systemd-journald root 14268 amazon-ssm-agent root 13508 systemd root 12160 systemd --user root 10240 sshd: root@pts/0 root 9088 sshd: root [priv] root 8944 systemd-udevd root 8704 systemd-logind root 8320 nix-daemon --daemon systemd-ti 8192 systemd-ti…

Why are you using systemd in a minimalist system?

I'm not trying to run a minimal system. This is just out of the box NixOS.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#255
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not difficult, you just need to run `htop` and perform addition of the RES column (which is in KB unless a unit is shown). Example: USER RES▽ Command root 70436 systemd-journald root 14268 amazon-ssm-agent root 13508 systemd root 12160 systemd --user root 10240 sshd: root@pts/0 root 9088 sshd: root [priv] root 8944 systemd-udevd root 8704 systemd-logind root 8320 nix-daemon --daemon systemd-ti 8192 systemd-ti…

>> You definitely can use Linux with few simple servers with 128 MB RAM. > > This is not difficult, you just need to run `htop` and perform addition of the RES column (which is in KB unless a unit is shown). Example: I'm not quite sure what points this makes... That's supposed to fit on 128MB? And it doesn't include memory consumed by the kernel itself (which is not negligible at this scale), and linux needs spare fo…

The point was that most of the shown software is optional, and you can check how much selecting those parts you care about sum up to.

To provide "conclusive proof" that it's possible to run a 128 MB Linux system.

For example, if you remove (or configure smaller memory use for) journald, the Amazon daemon, oomd, timesyncd, you are already at around 128 MB userspace, with more that can be removed if desired.

And this is on a distro that is not at all designed to be minimal in memory usage.

How much cache is good depends entirely on what you want the system to do.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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?

RAM from China already works and as Chinese RAM manufacturers scale up there's no reason they can't be competitive on price. Furthermore, it's more than possible for China to catch up technologically as well. Micron is likely to regret pissing off the majority of their customers if Chinese RAM manufacturers start aggressively targeting the market Micron have left behind, how bad this gets for Micron depends on how quickly they pivot back to the general consumer market.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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? RAM from China already works and as Chinese RAM manufacturers scale up there's no reason they can't be competitive on price. Furthermore, it's more than possible for China to catch up technologically as well. Micron is likely to regret pissing off the majority of thei…

I hope China overtakes the US just as it did in almost every other market. The US will fail, as it has chosen to.

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally all cloud applications hostable on any platform would just provide the following services to clients: A. rendezvous services so clients can connect to one another, B. storage/retrieval of encrypted data where the host does not have the key to decrypt, C. transport of encrypted data which cannot be known by the host due to B above. > How can you trust him to have redundant networks You can't, so abstract that…

Your data has to be decrypted somewhere to be useable, how would that work?

As direwolf20 says below, at the endpoints.

For a real world example, check out Tahoe LAFS: https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs

Re: Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

#260
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps but what is that point and are we truly approaching it? I’m thinking a $5 bill becomes a $7-10 bill. Those prices have already changed on a lot of things (food, cars, housing, etc) so won’t really be a shock to anyone. And is still an immaterial cost versus the headache of completely shifting their provider and architecture. I don’t think the cancellations will be massive, especially if you are wise and don’t raise prices for users who are paying for near zero utilization of resources. Those users are always most at risk of cancellation. Any time you email them some number of them will cancel. It’s best to not communicate much at all with this cohort. Every time you talk to them you’re reminding them “oh I am paying them for something I don’t use” and so they will login and cancel.
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