Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

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.

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 market.

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! Old hardware like this uses old ram that is less affected by the current shortage. It's good enough for my needs.

This article looks like actual gibberish to me?

It goes on about DSL and dial-up for some reason?

And yes VPS providers are affected by ram shortage. Turns out things that need ram are affected by ram shortages. 5 stars for the insight

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.

Most low-end providers will just keep using old hardware for longer.

IPv4 shortages didn’t kill it, and I don’t think this will either.

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 of the 1TB one.

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.

RAM is still cheaper than 10 years ago. Every time you ask "are RAM prices killing X?" ask yourself if we had X 10 years ago.

The RAM prices could cause serious scaling issues for everyone right now, including small businesses that deal with healthcare for example. Speaking from personal experience.

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 suspended my current K8S startup plan exactly due to the RAM shortage. Instead I sold my existing investment in RAM for a pretty good markup

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?

I dunno if DSL-based ISPs were going to last in the US. I mean, in a big country the range limits of DSL make it hard to compete with cable. I get 20Mbps at my location with fiber-to-the-node, but people a few miles down the road get 10x that speed with Time Warner cable for the same price. In some place like the Netherlands or South Korea it might be different, but not here.

They have no examples in the article of any VPS hosts that have recently died though???..

The US passed the Chips act in 2022. Is there really nobody reaching for those billions ready to crank out some memory four years later?

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

Can we get smaller VM hosts? I’ve seen some minimums at 512MB for a host. I need 8MB at most sometimes.

Update: Fourplex (this host) uses a 1GB minimum.

Rackspace is doubling the costs across the board of everything on their Rackspace Cloud products. They gave us 30 days notice and told us to switch to the new Rackspace Cloud (OpenStack Flex) with no tools to do so.

If we follow events at high-zoom:

- first graphics cards

- then RAM

- now NVME drives

The result? PCs become hyper-expensive and also hard to assemble for mere lack of components, then we get to VPS and keep going. The computing that remains is mobile and cloud, "the only integrated platforms," meaning the absence of digital ownership for most people, total control by the giants.

Think of it in these terms: nowadays GNU/Linux is starting to be a sought-after desktop, nowadays we can self-host with levels of accessibility even for newbies that we didn't have in the past, and the interest in doing so for those who know something is stronger than ever. And here come the reasons not to do it, economic and also physical.

Does it sound like "flat-earthism"? Well, it also sounds very realistic, at least net of the effects, we can say it's conspiracy theorizing, but thinking ill is a sin but you often guess right, said a prime minister a long time ago with a list of extraordinary scandals behind him.

Okay this is the type of post I want to see and the answer is absolutely an yes.

For context, I think I have recently been part of the lowendbox community and discussing things with providers etc.

Recently one of their providers actually cited the price increase directly to ram increase.

I was in talks with other VPS providers one of whom literally shared me a photo in the forum of what it costs them to get ram in their area.

I have been in talks with many many people within the VPS community and I have said this so many ocuntless times in here or lowendtalk (you can read my comments although I used to say this ~1 month ago iirc)

Heck, I wanted to build my own cloud. My father works in the bandwidth business (essentially you can say broadband/wifi)for ~10-15 years/ has very strong ties in it.

I on the other hand like/love tinkering with software side of things including virtualization and have made projects about it. I shared some request one month ago to talk to my dad and he said he was interested in datacenter idea

But I shit you not, it literally doesn't make sense even though A) my father has its own office, b) he can get essentially lots of bandwidth for free, C) we live in country with very cheap electricity comparative to many others.

And even if you have lots of hardwares, it doesn't just make sense to still have it if the price of replacement has increased so much far far.

There is also a forum called lowendspirit and I saw someone shut down their service citing this as well.

There are many posts on lowendbox (in which I have talked to) talking about the same thing as well

Simply I don't know how to state it, but the 4x price increase within ram simply literally didn't make sense. No thanks. I (or we?) are gonna wait the AI bubble or do something else/work more on software sides/just relax instead of making this.

I haven't even read the post but this is the most connected post I have felt in a long time!

To be really honest, I will admit that right now, personally I am either looking at mac 512 gb ultra or something which are still not ramflated from what I can tell or something or to be really honest, most cloud providers are burning money to not create a frenzy or still have pricing the same.

Personally, I love small cloud providers but recent times indiciate to me to favour stability. I have a netcup server myself but hetzner is an absolute love too from what i can tell and I can recommend any & OVH is another brilliant solution. All European.

Because these have/probably have large supplies. Soo like I know that OVH literally creates their own machiens, buys land and does everything and is a stock company so they are kind of a capital expenditure -> getting maximal profits machine in some sense (like yknow eliminating as much as middleman as possible kind of thing?) soo I guess the chances of OVH has lots of money to burn through to survive & brand reputation is crucial too and usually many of these run Black friday sometimes too

I guess another part is that most cloud providers can offset the losses right now for the hardware which can get cheap when the AI hardware bubble bursts but I odn't really know. I guess OVH or others might internally discuss this possibility too.

Atleast for me, I am gonna build software regarding the projects. I have found a huge disprecancy where whmcs and others have an almost monopoly so I am probably gonna spend a few months creating an open source project alternative (technically I already have a preview working with gvisor which I used with my netcup vps itself because gvisor can work in kvm machines itself not requiring nested kvm)

To be honest, shit's really hit the fan in this industry in ways that I can't tell. I have/had been in talks with an UK provider (https://xhosts.uk) [promoting because seems like a good guy] & he said that he's suffering the losses/taking the hits (for additional context he is disabled but iirc doesn't take disability checks) & he is from what I can tell actually impacted by such rising costs.

So being honest, this mad fuckery of an AI bubble is hurting an disabled person who wants to make a genuine living doing things he like.

I really want this bubble to pop right now. Like please. Just pop it and have the prices of hardware low because I talk to these providers and they are normal people like you and me and their business is impacted too all the while these large companies like AWS,GCP,Azure is what people use to rent or some shit in the first place with the returns/rent seeking that they are while you can get things for cheaper in lowendbox and other places in the first place but yeah of course you won't get the same stability (but will get pretty damn close imo) for much cheaper but what many people want is the ability to discount that when half of internet shuts down because of AWS east 1 just feeling like it, the customers wouldn't blame them directly for picking AWS but I guess if they use something even reliable lik ehetzner and say hetzner might have one downtime (which is rare but yea lets assume so) then maybe customers or business owners or anyone higher or lower in the team might push on the original person who might've suggested hetzner and they might get (fired?) or these are the justifications I see as to when people suggest that hey aws is bloated and burns so quickly, why not use alternatives like hetzner and many many other awesome services.

Thanks for listening to my (rant) & have a nice day (as one might have after the AI bubble given that no matter how harshly I write, no matter what I do, quite frankly I have no say in the AI bubble, so I personally what I like to do is actually use AI for free or the cheap and burn so much money of these AI companies to actually build open source cloud solution or something when the bubble pops but its a bit of an ideal but something I am working on I guess with the gvisor thing.

I don't know how to point it out but the tech behind AI is cool. There are gonna be some persisting changes (open weights model like kimi k2.5) etc. but I just don't know.

I really don't like the current timeline I live in regarding AI man. And I would consider myself to be sort of a person who actually uses AI many times but I do feel as a net, I feel as if AI might have been negative or atleast AI in the past year for some reason. Claude 3.5 sonnet or Deepseek v3 & things were going okay. Beyond that something definitely changed I mean there was already a bubble during DSv3 days but somehow it was still realist (the stock market). Right now I feel a fundamental disconnect between reality and market and the longer it continues, the worse its aftermath.

I really don't know how to describe what I am feeling but hopefully I have done a good job (with this lengthy comment) to explain all the things that i felt like talkjing about

Thank you to the author for creating this article so that we can have this relevant discussion. I haven't read it so I am gonna go ahead and do it just now.

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 coddled generation who were taught that AWS is the Internet and live in abstractions certainly hasn't helped.

Small VPS hosts shouldn’t really exist. They’re either resellers or just half-assing it.

How can you trust Gary from GaryHosting not to just steal all your data? How can you trust him to have redundant networks? You just can’t.