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.