10 ms·

Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?

228 points by neelc 8mo ago

Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
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 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.
miyuru 8mo ago
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.
- 1970-01-01 8mo ago
  Exactly this. The old hardware from a year ago is fine as the typical use-case for a VPS didn't change.
- neelc 8mo ago
  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.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    Have you tried doing ipv6-only plans?
    - Gigachad 8mo ago
      Vultr has one that's $2.5/month v6 only. Probably good if you just need something tiny to run some automation.
      - aitchnyu 8mo ago
        What are the issues faced by v6-only hosts and are there countries where it is a non-issue?
        miyuru 8mo ago
        GitHub is the main problem currently. Some software like composer does not work due to this. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 For countries, if you meaning connecting to VPS, lot of countries have good IPv6 connectivity now. For me both ISPs I use have native v6. This will differ from person to person. https://www.aelius.com/njh/google-ipv6/ https://www.aelius.com/njh/google-ipv6/
saidinesh5 8mo ago
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?
- nicoburns 8mo ago
  Pricing (both cheaper and more predictable), and reduced complexity.
  - saidinesh5 8mo ago
    Interesting. I'd have thought these giants would have better pricing because of the scale...
    - pinkgolem 8mo ago
      The last comparison I did was Hetzner offers 14x the performance per dollar Not including the faster SSD & included traffic
      - direwolf20 8mo ago
        Is that based on their cloud or dedicated offering?
        pinkgolem 8mo ago
        Cloud, dedicated is even cheaper
    - vel0city 8mo ago
      They give potentially worse pricing on a lot of the basic things (egress bandwidth, basic VM hosting, storage pricing) because their real value-add are all the extra managed services they offer on top of those things, the scale they're able to offer, and the more enterprise features. If you're using AWS/GCP/Azure to just host a couple of VMs for a small group you're massively overpaying.
ZenoArrow 8mo ago
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.
- realusername 8mo ago
  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.
  - giantrobot 8mo ago
    It would be a strategic opportunity for Intel, if they weren't run by imbeciles. DDR4 doesn't require the latest and greatest nodes. It's boring old technology. Even DDR5 is pretty boring. Intel could clean up fabbing DRAM (like they used to). But alas no. They're part of the semiconductor cartel and uninterested in the supply of DRAM increasing. Prices would drop and the fabs would only make stupid margins instead of disgusting margins.
    - zozbot234 8mo ago
      Intel would be in the very same bind as every other DRAM producer who's trying to expand production today, only far worse because they have practically no experience fabbing DRAM compared to logic. (You can fab eDRAM on logic processes, but you'd only do that out of sheer desperation since the cost per bit is much higher.) What they could do very easily in this market is bring back frickin Optane and hook it up to a modern PCIe bus with modern PCIe performance.
      - jiggawatts 8mo ago
        A recent development is High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) which works the same as HBM but uses less power and has far higher density. If Intel made an equivalent high bandwidth Optane product, they’d immediately corner the GPU memory market.
tokyobreakfast 8mo ago
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.
- fjnfnrnfn 8mo ago
  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
- nh2 8mo ago
  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).
  - tokyobreakfast 8mo ago
    >which 64 MB is systemd-journald why Windows NT was routinely run with 32 MB of RAM TOTAL and the event log is basically unchanged 30 years later.
    - actionfromafar 8mo ago
      Achtung, you will draw the ire of the systemd downvote zealots. Edit: Haha, withing a handful of seconds I got a downvote. :-D
  - nottorp 8mo ago
    >which 64 MB is systemd-journald Wait till they rewrite it in Rust!
- vbezhenar 8mo ago
conductr 8mo ago
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.
- layer8 8mo ago
  Yes, even if prices would triple, VPSs would still be an attractive offering.
- croes 8mo ago
  At a certain price people choose not to buy
  - conductr 8mo ago
    Sure, the market may shrink some but it's also relative to alternatives that are also increasing. There's no advice in the article the market is shrinking or that pricing is causing it to. People leaving the market on this type of cost will likely be people that have VPS's as idle resources, like some forgotten subscription they don't use but never canceled because it's <$10 per year. If that goes up to $20 per year maybe it triggers them to cancel it. It's so low cost I know this is a portion of their profit from customers like this, but it's just a business problem to solve and shouldn't kill any provider on it's own. The comparison to 2000s telcom market does not seem similar at all to me.
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      $10 per year is extremely rare. $5 per month is common, and if it goes up to $10, a lot of people will still keep it if they're using it. The provider is still making the same money for the same cost on that pre–existing service, so they might not even choose to raise the price for old customers. They're only losing an opportunity cost, and different businesses weight that differently.
      - conductr 8mo ago
Tiberium 8mo ago
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.
- megous 8mo ago
  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? :)
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mschuster91 8mo ago
    > 20000 / 8 customers / 40 USD/mo = 62 months just to recoup CPU and RAM let alone other components. the most important question is the power, such a setup will blow through easily 500W of power. Granted, a datacenter may not pay 33 ct/kWh but even then, 1/3rd of the monthly income will just go towards naked electricity, not including cooling. Electricity costs are ridiculous.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    Oversubscribe your hardware and you can do better. Most of your customers are idle most of the time.
    - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
      Yea some cloud providers are notorious for it. Netcup does oversubscribe/overshare but not sooo much. I have a server there and I don't really observe too much but although I haven't really gotten ways to detect that stealing factor but there are definitely scripts to detect it, maybe I will run it some day but oh well the laziness. The most overshared vps provider I know is contabo. Literally search anything on reddit,lowendbox, literally anywhere where there are people and they mention about how ~20-30% figure top of my head could be oversubscribed I am not exactly sure but my point is that when I first saw them, I found them the cheapest option (with their contabo auctions for something at really scale like 96 gb ram or something) but they are literally out of my book as well even as a frugal guy just because of how unstable they are or how much consistent I have seen people struggle about contabo. It's simply unrecommended imho. Netcup's 10x more pleasant from what I see other people's reaction to. People do mention some stealing factor on netcup but overall its really good and that sort of aligns with my experience with them too ig/
ianseyler 8mo ago
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.
- kube-system 8mo ago
  What's the use case for a VM with 8MB memory?
  - ianseyler 8mo ago
    A simple web server with some static content to server.
    - kube-system 8mo ago
      Running on what?... a quarter-century old linux kernel and busybox?
      - ianseyler 8mo ago
        http://baremetal.returninfinity.com http://baremetal.returninfinity.com
- lachiflippi 8mo ago
  Running modern full-fat Linux on anything sub-512MB isn't a great experience unless you're willing to do a lot of tweaking, or running specialized distros like alpine. If dropping the whole "vm" thing is an option, you can go much lower -- I've been running perfectly usable alpine lxc system containers on as low as 32MB -- though container-based vps kind of fell out of favor in the last couple years, probably due to the issues that come with not having your "own" kernel in "your" vps. Virtuozzo/openvz was everywhere back then, now it's pretty much all kvm/vmware/hyperv.
MagicMoonlight 8mo ago
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.
- RiverCrochet 8mo ago
  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.
  - ornornor 8mo ago
    Your data has to be decrypted somewhere to be useable, how would that work?
    - gllmariuty 8mo ago
      [dead]
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      at the endpoints
    - RiverCrochet 8mo ago
      As direwolf20 says below, at the endpoints. For a real world example, check out Tahoe LAFS: https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs
- OkayPhysicist 8mo ago
  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.
dpedu 8mo ago
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.
- neelc 8mo ago
  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.
  - 101008 8mo ago
    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!
    - asutor 8mo ago
      This is something I'd love to know, too. I like servers, infrastructure, and terminals, so doing something like this has been in the back of my head for a while now
    - fy20 8mo ago
      Start reading /r/homelab if you don't already. Old enterprise hardware can be had for pennies. You obviously won't host the service at home, but it's a good intro to the hardware side of things.
    - anonzzzies 8mo ago
      I used to do site/vps hosting (millions of sites); we just bought slightly older 1U rack servers off ebay (and later our rack neighbour in the hosting room, who always had to buy the latest for his clients allowed us to buy of him) and kept filling local racks. We paid for a large bad quality bandwidth pipe for the large bandwidth eaters and good quality for the smaller traffic properties; we served some % of traffic per host through the good and after that through the bad. The porn / warez or whatever people didn't care and the business or hobby folk were happy as well. In the end it got too much work with that many servers, something is always broken ; we had some virtualisation and failover stuff, but you have to go and repair it. We were basically two fulltime guys + some freelance and that meant getting into a car and driving for an hour every other day, storm or ice on the roads, christmas or birthday, doesn't matter. It made good money and we sold nicely, but servers are loud and we have been so often there for hours that even with ear protection I think it messed something up. Also crawling in small spaces for wiring etc isn't great for your body. I did learn a lot about Linux and the popular packages; we had our own patches and versions of most to shield from 0-days and save processing waste to put more on one machine without it degrading quality. I would not do it with reselling ; you have no control; when the police called us for illegal/child materials and so on, we were in charge of removing/blocking that; if you resell, they will likely first just shutdown everything you have and then ask you for an explanation. And after a few time delete you and that's it. Or when there is something wrong technically, you are left holding the bag anyway as many will just blame you (and then after 'some time' your service 'suddenly' is back). You can hire much more expensive stuff with much better support but in our experience, that does not help much when there is a LOT of abuse (and with millions of sites, you have a lot of abuse that you cannot check). It's fun though; just too much work.
JohnTHaller 8mo ago
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.
imglorp 8mo ago
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?
- gravypod 8mo ago
  This was in the news recently: https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/micron-announces-groundbreaking-historic-new-york-megafab https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
  - imglorp 8mo ago
    Coming soon, in late 2030. https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2025/11/micron-chip-factories-in-upstate-ny-delayed-by-two-to-three-years-company-says.html https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2025/11/micron-chip-factorie...
- CamperBob2 8mo ago
  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?
direwolf20 8mo ago
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.
- dijit 8mo ago
  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 $150 [2, again]. That's a 150%+ increase in six months, pushing capable systems out of reach for budget-conscious users precisely when software bloat is making RAM more essential than ever. [1] https://gamersnexus.net/industry/3212-ram-price-investigation-ddr4-same-price-as-initial-launch https://gamersnexus.net/industry/3212-ram-price-investigatio... [2] https://gamersnexus.net/news/ram-wtf https://gamersnexus.net/news/ram-wtf [3] https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=ddr4+ram+8gb https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=ddr4+ram+8gb [4] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ [5] https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/ https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/
  - iszomer 8mo ago
    In late 2024 I bought a 32GB kit with unbuffered ECC for ~80$ /shrug
    - 8mo ago
kkfx 8mo ago
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.
- gllmariuty 8mo ago
  [dead]
Havoc 8mo ago
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
- jlund-molfese 8mo ago
  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.
- barrkel 8mo ago
  The Bell / telephony analogy is unrelated and forced. Feels like the author had an Idea, and asked an LLM to force the analogy.
indigodaddy 8mo ago
They have no examples in the article of any VPS hosts that have recently died though???..
PaulHoule 8mo ago
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.
- charcircuit 8mo ago
  DSL is infinitely faster than a nonexistent cable wiring that will never be financially viable to provide.
  - Tostino 8mo ago
    These companies were already paid to wire up the US with fiber using taxpayer dollars.
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      and they took the money and didn't do it and didn't get prosecuted
      - Tostino 8mo ago
        Exactly. Points out how "will never be financially viable to provide" is a completely BS argument in this context.
        charcircuit 8mo ago
        It isn't. I gave up on waiting and switched to starlink. The existence of starlink provides even less financial reward for for paying to wire up my house.
        Tostino 8mo ago
        I'm not saying for you personally it is financially viable. I am saying that these companies have zero excuse to say that providing that service to every single American isn't financially viable. They were already paid to do that, and simply took the money and didn't provide the service. We could still hold them to account if there was any political will to do so.
stevefan1999 8mo ago
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
t312227 8mo ago
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 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/ https://stratechery.com/2026/tsmc-risk/ and "The Benefits of Bubbles" * https://stratechery.com/2025/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
INTPenis 8mo 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.
sschueller 8mo ago
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.
- nirui 8mo ago
  Unlikely. What's more likely is that they just simply don't care. They have turned this into an arms race now, killing off competitors is much more important than caring about coastal damage or even their own future. But this does highlight the fact that most of our hardware is produced (and thus can be restricted) by a few cartel-like players, just like what's happened in the Internet industry.
matt-p 8mo ago
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 https://serversearcher.com) but those types are unlikely to get any cheaper, for sure.
bArray 8mo ago
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.

228 points by neelc 8mo ago

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 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.

miyuru 8mo ago

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.

1970-01-01 8mo ago
Exactly this. The old hardware from a year ago is fine as the typical use-case for a VPS didn't change.
neelc 8mo ago
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.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  Have you tried doing ipv6-only plans?
  - Gigachad 8mo ago
    Vultr has one that's $2.5/month v6 only. Probably good if you just need something tiny to run some automation.
    - aitchnyu 8mo ago
      What are the issues faced by v6-only hosts and are there countries where it is a non-issue?
      - miyuru 8mo ago
        GitHub is the main problem currently. Some software like composer does not work due to this. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 For countries, if you meaning connecting to VPS, lot of countries have good IPv6 connectivity now. For me both ISPs I use have native v6. This will differ from person to person. https://www.aelius.com/njh/google-ipv6/ https://www.aelius.com/njh/google-ipv6/

saidinesh5 8mo ago

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?

nicoburns 8mo ago
Pricing (both cheaper and more predictable), and reduced complexity.
- saidinesh5 8mo ago
  Interesting. I'd have thought these giants would have better pricing because of the scale...
  - pinkgolem 8mo ago
    The last comparison I did was Hetzner offers 14x the performance per dollar Not including the faster SSD & included traffic
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      Is that based on their cloud or dedicated offering?
      - pinkgolem 8mo ago
        Cloud, dedicated is even cheaper
  - vel0city 8mo ago
    They give potentially worse pricing on a lot of the basic things (egress bandwidth, basic VM hosting, storage pricing) because their real value-add are all the extra managed services they offer on top of those things, the scale they're able to offer, and the more enterprise features. If you're using AWS/GCP/Azure to just host a couple of VMs for a small group you're massively overpaying.

ZenoArrow 8mo ago

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.

realusername 8mo ago
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.
- giantrobot 8mo ago
  It would be a strategic opportunity for Intel, if they weren't run by imbeciles. DDR4 doesn't require the latest and greatest nodes. It's boring old technology. Even DDR5 is pretty boring. Intel could clean up fabbing DRAM (like they used to). But alas no. They're part of the semiconductor cartel and uninterested in the supply of DRAM increasing. Prices would drop and the fabs would only make stupid margins instead of disgusting margins.
  - zozbot234 8mo ago
    Intel would be in the very same bind as every other DRAM producer who's trying to expand production today, only far worse because they have practically no experience fabbing DRAM compared to logic. (You can fab eDRAM on logic processes, but you'd only do that out of sheer desperation since the cost per bit is much higher.) What they could do very easily in this market is bring back frickin Optane and hook it up to a modern PCIe bus with modern PCIe performance.
    - jiggawatts 8mo ago
      A recent development is High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) which works the same as HBM but uses less power and has far higher density. If Intel made an equivalent high bandwidth Optane product, they’d immediately corner the GPU memory market.

tokyobreakfast 8mo ago

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.

fjnfnrnfn 8mo ago
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
nh2 8mo ago
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).
- tokyobreakfast 8mo ago
  >which 64 MB is systemd-journald why Windows NT was routinely run with 32 MB of RAM TOTAL and the event log is basically unchanged 30 years later.
  - actionfromafar 8mo ago
    Achtung, you will draw the ire of the systemd downvote zealots. Edit: Haha, withing a handful of seconds I got a downvote. :-D
- nottorp 8mo ago
  >which 64 MB is systemd-journald Wait till they rewrite it in Rust!
vbezhenar 8mo ago

conductr 8mo ago

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.

layer8 8mo ago
Yes, even if prices would triple, VPSs would still be an attractive offering.
croes 8mo ago
At a certain price people choose not to buy
- conductr 8mo ago
  Sure, the market may shrink some but it's also relative to alternatives that are also increasing. There's no advice in the article the market is shrinking or that pricing is causing it to. People leaving the market on this type of cost will likely be people that have VPS's as idle resources, like some forgotten subscription they don't use but never canceled because it's <$10 per year. If that goes up to $20 per year maybe it triggers them to cancel it. It's so low cost I know this is a portion of their profit from customers like this, but it's just a business problem to solve and shouldn't kill any provider on it's own. The comparison to 2000s telcom market does not seem similar at all to me.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    $10 per year is extremely rare. $5 per month is common, and if it goes up to $10, a lot of people will still keep it if they're using it. The provider is still making the same money for the same cost on that pre–existing service, so they might not even choose to raise the price for old customers. They're only losing an opportunity cost, and different businesses weight that differently.
    - conductr 8mo ago

Tiberium 8mo ago

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.

megous 8mo ago
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? :)
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- mschuster91 8mo ago
  > 20000 / 8 customers / 40 USD/mo = 62 months just to recoup CPU and RAM let alone other components. the most important question is the power, such a setup will blow through easily 500W of power. Granted, a datacenter may not pay 33 ct/kWh but even then, 1/3rd of the monthly income will just go towards naked electricity, not including cooling. Electricity costs are ridiculous.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  Oversubscribe your hardware and you can do better. Most of your customers are idle most of the time.
  - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
    Yea some cloud providers are notorious for it. Netcup does oversubscribe/overshare but not sooo much. I have a server there and I don't really observe too much but although I haven't really gotten ways to detect that stealing factor but there are definitely scripts to detect it, maybe I will run it some day but oh well the laziness. The most overshared vps provider I know is contabo. Literally search anything on reddit,lowendbox, literally anywhere where there are people and they mention about how ~20-30% figure top of my head could be oversubscribed I am not exactly sure but my point is that when I first saw them, I found them the cheapest option (with their contabo auctions for something at really scale like 96 gb ram or something) but they are literally out of my book as well even as a frugal guy just because of how unstable they are or how much consistent I have seen people struggle about contabo. It's simply unrecommended imho. Netcup's 10x more pleasant from what I see other people's reaction to. People do mention some stealing factor on netcup but overall its really good and that sort of aligns with my experience with them too ig/

ianseyler 8mo ago

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.

kube-system 8mo ago
What's the use case for a VM with 8MB memory?
- ianseyler 8mo ago
  A simple web server with some static content to server.
  - kube-system 8mo ago
    Running on what?... a quarter-century old linux kernel and busybox?
    - ianseyler 8mo ago
      http://baremetal.returninfinity.com http://baremetal.returninfinity.com
lachiflippi 8mo ago
Running modern full-fat Linux on anything sub-512MB isn't a great experience unless you're willing to do a lot of tweaking, or running specialized distros like alpine. If dropping the whole "vm" thing is an option, you can go much lower -- I've been running perfectly usable alpine lxc system containers on as low as 32MB -- though container-based vps kind of fell out of favor in the last couple years, probably due to the issues that come with not having your "own" kernel in "your" vps. Virtuozzo/openvz was everywhere back then, now it's pretty much all kvm/vmware/hyperv.

MagicMoonlight 8mo ago

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.

RiverCrochet 8mo ago
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.
- ornornor 8mo ago
  Your data has to be decrypted somewhere to be useable, how would that work?
  - gllmariuty 8mo ago
    [dead]
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    at the endpoints
  - RiverCrochet 8mo ago
    As direwolf20 says below, at the endpoints. For a real world example, check out Tahoe LAFS: https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs
OkayPhysicist 8mo ago
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.

dpedu 8mo ago

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.

neelc 8mo ago
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.
- 101008 8mo ago
  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!
  - asutor 8mo ago
    This is something I'd love to know, too. I like servers, infrastructure, and terminals, so doing something like this has been in the back of my head for a while now
  - fy20 8mo ago
    Start reading /r/homelab if you don't already. Old enterprise hardware can be had for pennies. You obviously won't host the service at home, but it's a good intro to the hardware side of things.
  - anonzzzies 8mo ago
    I used to do site/vps hosting (millions of sites); we just bought slightly older 1U rack servers off ebay (and later our rack neighbour in the hosting room, who always had to buy the latest for his clients allowed us to buy of him) and kept filling local racks. We paid for a large bad quality bandwidth pipe for the large bandwidth eaters and good quality for the smaller traffic properties; we served some % of traffic per host through the good and after that through the bad. The porn / warez or whatever people didn't care and the business or hobby folk were happy as well. In the end it got too much work with that many servers, something is always broken ; we had some virtualisation and failover stuff, but you have to go and repair it. We were basically two fulltime guys + some freelance and that meant getting into a car and driving for an hour every other day, storm or ice on the roads, christmas or birthday, doesn't matter. It made good money and we sold nicely, but servers are loud and we have been so often there for hours that even with ear protection I think it messed something up. Also crawling in small spaces for wiring etc isn't great for your body. I did learn a lot about Linux and the popular packages; we had our own patches and versions of most to shield from 0-days and save processing waste to put more on one machine without it degrading quality. I would not do it with reselling ; you have no control; when the police called us for illegal/child materials and so on, we were in charge of removing/blocking that; if you resell, they will likely first just shutdown everything you have and then ask you for an explanation. And after a few time delete you and that's it. Or when there is something wrong technically, you are left holding the bag anyway as many will just blame you (and then after 'some time' your service 'suddenly' is back). You can hire much more expensive stuff with much better support but in our experience, that does not help much when there is a LOT of abuse (and with millions of sites, you have a lot of abuse that you cannot check). It's fun though; just too much work.

JohnTHaller 8mo ago

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.

imglorp 8mo ago

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?

gravypod 8mo ago
This was in the news recently: https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/micron-announces-groundbreaking-historic-new-york-megafab https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
- imglorp 8mo ago
  Coming soon, in late 2030. https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2025/11/micron-chip-factories-in-upstate-ny-delayed-by-two-to-three-years-company-says.html https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2025/11/micron-chip-factorie...
CamperBob2 8mo ago
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?

direwolf20 8mo ago

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.

dijit 8mo ago
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 $150 [2, again]. That's a 150%+ increase in six months, pushing capable systems out of reach for budget-conscious users precisely when software bloat is making RAM more essential than ever. [1] https://gamersnexus.net/industry/3212-ram-price-investigation-ddr4-same-price-as-initial-launch https://gamersnexus.net/industry/3212-ram-price-investigatio... [2] https://gamersnexus.net/news/ram-wtf https://gamersnexus.net/news/ram-wtf [3] https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=ddr4+ram+8gb https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=ddr4+ram+8gb [4] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ [5] https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/ https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/
- iszomer 8mo ago
  In late 2024 I bought a 32GB kit with unbuffered ECC for ~80$ /shrug
  - 8mo ago

kkfx 8mo ago

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.

gllmariuty 8mo ago
[dead]

Havoc 8mo ago

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

jlund-molfese 8mo ago
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.
barrkel 8mo ago
The Bell / telephony analogy is unrelated and forced. Feels like the author had an Idea, and asked an LLM to force the analogy.

indigodaddy 8mo ago

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

PaulHoule 8mo ago

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.

charcircuit 8mo ago
DSL is infinitely faster than a nonexistent cable wiring that will never be financially viable to provide.
- Tostino 8mo ago
  These companies were already paid to wire up the US with fiber using taxpayer dollars.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    and they took the money and didn't do it and didn't get prosecuted
    - Tostino 8mo ago
      Exactly. Points out how "will never be financially viable to provide" is a completely BS argument in this context.
      - charcircuit 8mo ago
        It isn't. I gave up on waiting and switched to starlink. The existence of starlink provides even less financial reward for for paying to wire up my house.
        Tostino 8mo ago
        I'm not saying for you personally it is financially viable. I am saying that these companies have zero excuse to say that providing that service to every single American isn't financially viable. They were already paid to do that, and simply took the money and didn't provide the service. We could still hold them to account if there was any political will to do so.

stevefan1999 8mo ago

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

t312227 8mo ago

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 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/ https://stratechery.com/2026/tsmc-risk/ and "The Benefits of Bubbles" * https://stratechery.com/2025/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

INTPenis 8mo 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.

sschueller 8mo ago

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.

nirui 8mo ago
Unlikely. What's more likely is that they just simply don't care. They have turned this into an arms race now, killing off competitors is much more important than caring about coastal damage or even their own future. But this does highlight the fact that most of our hardware is produced (and thus can be restricted) by a few cartel-like players, just like what's happened in the Internet industry.

matt-p 8mo ago

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 https://serversearcher.com) but those types are unlikely to get any cheaper, for sure.

bArray 8mo ago

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.