Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

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 some decent money now, but vastly expanding capacity as is means enormous losses if the cycle went downward a few years later, that's how all previous makers went bankrupt.

They can squeeze out a bit more performance if they are ready to go beyond their current node using only domestic equipment and be blacklisted by the US government.

But the cap is there, unless they can make a working EUV machine in 5 years, they are doomed to be a minor player, if the current cycle even lasts that long.

They will first fill the local demand for all their electronics manufacturing. Then their massive computer infra and AI. And if any is left, it will be bundled to local PC exporters like Lenovo.

China also needs RAM for AIs, especially since they have plenty of electrical power and building speed to pump out data-centers.

That's probably what is going to happen, it's a strategic opportunity for the Chinese government here, there's a big market demand that can fuel their domestic production capabilities that nobody wants to take.

I am very hopeful of CXMT. But then then it could take a while for them to ramp up production. Maybe by then, the AI bubble would've burst.

One problem with US sanctions is it could hurt US companies too, like in the case of cutting-edge EUV and CXMT. This is when China is actually a hero and not a villain.

>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 that, in the crypto boom, the boom quickly turned into a bust and the memory makers got burned with a bad case of oversupply for years. With that context, can you blame them for wanting to go a bit more slowly with this boom?

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'. They're pivoting to higher profit margin segments - rational behavior for a for-profit corporation - but thanks to the invisible hand of the (not quite as free as it should be) market, this is, partially, a self-solving issue, as DRAM margins soar while HBM margins compress, and we're already seeing industry response to that dynamic, too: https://www.guru3d.com/story/samsung-reallocates-of-hbm3-cap...

I truly wish Chinese Ram manufacturers luck to fulfill this market. Seriously, the amount of ram and its downstream effects can be hardly understated imo. it really just starts impacting everything.

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.

I agree, I think the author had some thoughts in their head that they forgot to write down, because it feels like at least a few paragraphs making the connection are missing. Happens to me all the time when I'm writing something too honestly.

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.

Exactly this. The old hardware from a year ago is fine as the typical use-case for a VPS didn't change.

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.

Do they not intend to recoup the costs of HW? :)

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 ~5-6$ per month but its still a recurring deal so I guess I might as well continue it (given I have setten everything up)

Some of it is definitely lose making as well to lock in. I usually try to see what gets me to buy a deal because i usually don't buy many things especially online and its usually within some deal concept where I feel like "winning" that I do.

But to be honest, I did some napkin math and honestly, at least for my VPS (although Its usually idle but I have hosted many services on it or experimented with it, its honestly pretty fun imo, I definitely feel so much more freedom imo somehow after getting a vps its hard to explain I suppose or maybe not idk)

But my napkin maths suggests that they lose quite a lot of money with atleast my deal in particular so I got better off getting this deal than say if I was netcup myself somehow (because they probably lose net money on my deal if I actually really use my allocated limits I guess) atleast for the 3 months but I feel like netcup's still one of the more cheaper options and I got a recurring discount deal with it too sooo I would still consider them to have only marginal profits over a long term deal as well.

SO I guess overall, this was a really profitable deal for me.

Your deal's pretty cool too, honestly at large scale. I have done scraping of lowendtalk and analyzed and done many decisions and infrastructural decisions and honestly I will say taht for anything somewhat large scale like you mention 32 gb or something, I found hetzner boxes to be the best/most referred to option & OVH kimsufi line is created to be the cheapest dedicated boxes.

But yeah regarding OVH i recommend this website that I found regarding OVH KS line or just in general https://checkservers.ovh

Just checked it right now and I see Xeon E-2274G 4c / 8t 4.4 GHz+ 32 GB DDR4 ECC 2666 MHz 2 x 960 GB NVMe for around 37-38 euros ish

Also Netcup's definitely not small. I looked at anexia group and I wouldn't constitute them as small. For understanding what small means I guess when I mean small, I mean lowendbox single shop providers and others.

Also regarding Netcup, its payment system was really ass from what I felt like. Like It was the first company which made me feel like I wanted to pay it money but I had to make a CCP or some account nad literally had to go through like 3-4 really long things imo which really made me say (wtf) in my head each time and frustrated me only to give me a stripe link in the end.

It had me so pissed that for 2-3 days one idea of simplifying its whole process and other such providers stuck in my head. Its payment / the whole process of I want to pay -> create account -> actually pay had like 5-6 maybe 7 steps or something and I seriously can't tell you how I frustrated I was but the deal was too lucrative lol

I'm not sure this holds up when you look at the actual numbers. In 2016, you could get a DDR4-2400 16GB kit for $81 [1], and a comparable G.SKILL Ripjaws V kit was around $52 [2]. Today (January 2026), that same G.SKILL kit costs $105-146 [3], and most 16GB DDR4 kits are running $95-150 [4]. So RAM is actually more expensive now than it was 10 years ago, not cheaper.

The "did we have X 10 years ago" argument also misses a a lot of modern software requirements. Yes, we had mid-range laptops and budget gaming PCs in 2016, but the memory footprint of everyday applications has exploded since then. Electron-based apps (Slack, Teams, VS Code, Discord) routinely consume 500MB-1GB+ each [5], and it's entirely normal to have multiple running simultaneously. A typical "light" workload in 2026 easily uses 2-3x the RAM that a comparable workflow needed in 2016.

So we're getting squeezed from both sides: applications demand more memory whilst memory itself costs more. An 8GB laptop was perfectly serviceable for office work in 2016; in 2026, it's borderline unusable with a few Chrome tabs and Teams open. The same kit that cost $55 in June 2025 now costs $150 [2, again]. That's a 150%+ increase in six months, pushing capable systems out of reach for budget-conscious users precisely when software bloat is making RAM more essential than ever.

[1] https://gamersnexus.net/industry/3212-ram-price-investigatio... [2] https://gamersnexus.net/news/ram-wtf [3] https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=ddr4+ram+8gb [4] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ [5] https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/

In March 2015 I could buy a "Corsair Vengeance RED 32GB (4x8GB) DDR3 PC3-14900C10 1866MHz Dual/Quad Channel Kit" for £259.99 [1]

Today, I can buy a "Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4 PC4-28800C18 3600MHz Quad Channel Kit" for £259.99 [2]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150303141114/http://www.overcl... [2] https://www.overclockers.co.uk/corsair-vengeance-lpx-32gb-4x...

DSL is infinitely faster than a nonexistent cable wiring that will never be financially viable to provide.

Until recently I had a 4gb ram 80gb ssd+2tb hd VPS running debian in a Montreal data centre with a real use 700 mbit pipe to my city with a budget provider for the equivalent of $80USD/year. When fio speeds were slow they moved me to a less crowded server. I gave it up as don't need it and moved my personal sites back to NFS for peanuts a year and services to my NAS. The pricing, offsite storage for my backups, Canadian sovereignty, lack of perceived complexity with a big provider was all attractive. I'm a physician with a tech hobby and last serious tech work was in the LAMP days with perl and php. Trying to think of learning about AWS and screwing up usage based billing was daunting!

Much better prices, and simplicity. The power you get from Hetzner or Kimsufi is crazy compared to AWS.

If I need to host something small, I don’t want to mess around with the many permissions and quirks that are required to deal with AWS. It is often much easier to just setup the server on a standalone service.

Most of my customers (small VPS host here) don't like the companies behind AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, especially the amount of influence they have in the world and how they wield it. And the pricing often isn't that much different between a small VPS host and either a cloud provider or one of the larger VPS providers (Akamai/Linode, Digital Ocean, etc.) - larger providers have economies of scale, but smaller providers don't have as much overhead for paying sales and C-suite.

There's also the human touch in terms of who you talk to: a lot of the smallest VPS hosts are 1-2 people, both technical, so customer support = sysadmin = contact for everything.

If the only thing you need is "server, accessible via the internet, always online", and you're not interested in all the vendor lock-in masquerading as useful services offered by the big cloud providers, then small VPS hosts are 100% the way to go. For mid-sized servers they're cheaper (i.e., stuff that wouldn't be free on the big clouds, but not "I want a petaflop"), with more transparent pricing (I pay $12, every month. If I get inundated with traffic, I'll get cut off until I choose to pay more).

I'd use digital ocean over AWS for any SMB or lean startup (so... anyone not attached to an infinite money hose that has to either scale to NEED AWS, or die trying) just because of 1) their UI not being broken glass you have to crawl over and 2) not having eight trillion features that make doing simple things hard and 3) pricing

I could pay like 30 bucks a month for an absolutely overspecc'd VPS (64GB/16c) that would cost around 20X on AWS (According to ChatGPT; which sounds about right based on the last time I cared to even look into it)

Does it have a billion 9's of reliability? No, but I don't care, it has literally never not worked when I've used it

Customer Service so far has been human, but that will vary greatly for the provider

I also use a different provider for work related hosting, and the reduced latency of being within 20 ms of the DC has been probably the single biggest (perceived) perf improvement my users have ever seen, specially on the legacy webforms platform we recently decomissioned (We're a bit too geographically far for most Datacenters of most large providers)

There are ones that don’t price gouge you on bandwidth.

Price. 1 vCore, 2GB RAM, 20GB SSD, unlimited traffic (though throttled to 200mbit/s after transferring 2TB within 24 hours) = 1.85€

That is a nice way to have a static IP on the internet and enough resources to do small things like host a nameserver and/or OpenVPN/Wireguard.

I may have had 4 hours of downtime in one year, always announced days in advance.

Low cost, simplicity and customer service.

AWS does offer Lightsail which is similar pricing.

I used a vps service hosted in a country with strong digital privacy laws to host a personal wireguard+pihole vpn. I could probably think up a decent argument why that privacy with the smaller guy was only nominal but I could absolutely think up a good argument why doing that on a big name would have no privacy guarantees at all, especially as someone who would be in the bottom rung payment-wise.

Never had problems with downtime and I payed, like, 40 bucks a year over 3 years. I think I had to restart the thing once because of something dumb I did on my end.

Much cheaper. The big 3 are costing you as if it's still 2009, and they don't change this because people have an irrational attachment to overpaying.

The only advantage is cheapness, for personal use.

If you’re a government agency or a company you don’t care about saving $14/month, you want a secure provider. And these hosts are not secure, you’re basically just on your own.

Small VPS hosts oversell like crazy and they offer much lower prices. Also their reliability might be worse, because they don't migrate VM between hosts.

Spending caps is the biggest reason for me. Granted, some VPS don't offer this (vital!) feature, but none of the big 3 or similar services do.

10-100x cheaper

Where small VPS hosts can make a difference: require no KYC, accept crypto payments.

Others have mentioned the general pricing, simplicity etc.

Outbound data pricing is a potentially huge saving.

AWS is as much as $90/TB outbound with 1GB free. Hetzner is $1.20/TB (in EU and US) with 1TB/20TB (US/EU) free.

(Good) Smaller places are more likely to have actual technical staff you can talk to.

Simplicity, price, stability.

Not being US owned can be an important one in this geopolitical climate.

Pricing mostly, and also simplicity. Big cloud is incredibly expensive when you really look at it. The markup is huge.

It’s weird because in most of this industry scale results in lower prices. Not in cloud.

Predictable and extremely low costs for less critical stuff. My 2 main ones are respectively around 4 and 8 EUR per _year_.

I use them to run wireguard to evade geoblocks when I'm travelling, a few redundant monitoring scripts alerting me of reachability issues of more critical stuff I care about, they serve as contingency access channels to my home (and home assistant) if my primary channels are down.

I get no support, no updates, it's all on me - which is fine, it allows me to stay current and not lose hands-on practice on skills which I anyway need for my job (and which are anyway my passion). I don't even get an entire IPv4 - I get.... 1/3000th of it? (21 ports, the rest are forwarded to other customers). Suits me fine.

Pricing (both cheaper and more predictable), and reduced complexity.

Simplicity, and low price.

VPS services are usually really, really simple and fairly cheap.

I'd say that actually VPS prices is where we actually see computing prices going down rather than on the big 3.

AWS used to optimize further and pass down the savings to the customers back in the day, now they don't do it anymore.

I like Vultr for the simplicity of my own projects. I really hate spending my time on provisioning and similar labyrinths.

Pricing. They overprovision aggressively but most people actually just need a 0.1 CPU available remotely for the majority of their use cases.

I replaced with a home server and it costs way more just in power hahaha.

Not being Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

I moved from AWS to Hetzner, because: 1. lower prices, 2. not American

Yes, even if prices would triple, VPSs would still be an attractive offering.

At a certain price people choose not to buy

This was in the news recently: https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...

The idea behind the CHIPS act made some sense, but with these monkeys in charge (and the voters who elected them), no one has any idea what's going to happen next week, next month, next year, or over the next 10 years. It turns out that predictable, consistent, and coherent trade policy is actually fucking important. Who would have guessed?

What's the use case for a VM with 8MB memory?

[dead]

On the contrary, it's impossible to trust Amazon not to be evil, because eventually some suit with an MBA is going to go "we can make 0.001% more money this year by having orphans hand-deliver packets across the freeway, frogger style. What are people going to do, leave? Where else will they host their application built around our proprietary FireHouse LightWave Message Comorbidifier?"

On the other hand, I can trust Gary. Gary's personally responsible for GaryHosting, and he obviously takes that role seriously, given he slapped his name on the front. And if Gary fails, I can just switch to a different provider. Gary doesn't have a moat, he sells a commodity. His only advantage in this world is treating his customers well enough that they don't leave.

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 away at the application layer. Make it not dependent on a single host or network.

My NixOS SSH jump host server here idles at 234 MB of which 64 MB is systemd-journald (which I assume can be reduced with some settings of how much to keep in RAM).

You definitely can use Linux with few simple servers with 128 MB RAM.

Install can be tricky indeed, but if you have installed system, it's easier.

    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-timesyncd
    systemd-oo  7808  systemd-oomd
    root        6492  -zsh
    nscd        6272  nsncd
    messagebus  5888  dbus-daemon --system --address=systemd: --nofork --nopidfile -
    root        5888  htop
    sshd        4904  sshd: root [net]
    root        4736  sshd: sshd -D -f /etc/ssh/sshd_config [listener] 1 of 10-100
    root        2960  (sd-pam)
    root        2816  agetty --login-program login ttyS0 --keep-baud
    root        2192  dhcpcd: [privileged proxy]
    dhcpcd      1680  dhcpcd: [manager] [ip4] [ip6]
    dhcpcd      1468  dhcpcd: [BPF ARP] ens5 172.31.8.86
    dhcpcd      1168  dhcpcd: [control proxy]
    dhcpcd      1040  dhcpcd: [network proxy]

    $ awk '{ tot+=$2 } END { print tot /1024 }' < list
    214.035