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There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM. By paying $20 instead of $5 you can get at least 8gb of RAM. You can use it for caches or a database tha
by f311a 6mo ago
There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM. By paying $20 instead of $5 you can get at least 8gb of RAM. You can use it for caches or a database that supports concurrent writes. The $15 difference won’t make any financial difference if you are trying to run a small business.
Thinking about on how to fit everything on a $5 VPS does not help your business.
- jampekka 6mo ago$15 is not exactly zero, is it? If you don't need more than 1GB, why pay anything for more than 1GB? I recall running LAMP stacks on something like 128MB about 20 years ago and not really having problems with memory. Most current website backends are not really much more complicated than they were back then if you don't haul in bloat.
- bdelmas 6mo agoIt is. With 10k MRR it represents 0.15% of the revenue. Having the whole backend costing that much for a company selling web apps is like it’s costing zero.
- jvuygbbkuurx 6mo agoYou probably don't make 10k MMR on day one. If you make many small apps, it can make sense to learn how to run things lean to have 4x longer runway per app.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- mlyle 6mo agoThe runway is going to be your time and attention span, not $10/mo. I don't know what you value your time or opportunity cost as... but the $10/mo doesn't need to save very many minutes of your time deferring dealing with a resource constraint or add too much reliability to pay off. If resource limitations end up upsetting one end user, that costs more than $10.
- jampekka 6mo agoThis assumes you have to spend any time or attention worrying. 1GB is plenty of memory for backend type stuff. And most VPSs allow increasing memory with a click of a button and a reboot.
- r0fl 6mo agoOverspending for the sake of overspending is not smart in life or business.
- kaliqt 6mo agoThere’s a happy medium and $5 for 1GB RAM just isn’t it.
- lijok 6mo agoNot a very strong argument now is it?
- pas 6mo agoif the project already has positive revenue then arguably the ability to capture new users is worth a lot, which requires acceptable performance even when a big traffic surge is happening (like a HN hug of attention) if the scalability is in the number of "zero cost" projects to start, then 5 vs 15 is a 3x factor.
- cbdevidal 6mo agoBe sure to inform the author of the article who is currently making money on his 1GB VPS that he hasn’t found a happy medium
- elAhmo 6mo agoSaving 15 USD on 10k+ USD MMR is ridiculous.
- cbdevidal 6mo agoSaving 15 USD on 0 USD MMR while still building the business is priceless. Virtually infinite runway.
- jeremyjh 6mo agoOnly if your time is worthless and someone else is paying your living expenses.
- compounding_it 6mo agoGiven how much revenue depends on the experience of a web app and loading times, I’d be happy to pay 100$ a month on that revenue if I don’t have to sacrifice a second of additional loading time no matter how clever I was optimizing it.
- kijin 6mo agoThat 1 second of loading time probably has more to do with heavy frontends and third-party scripts, than the backend server's capacity. $100 is peanuts to most businesses, of course. But even so, I'd rather spend it on fixing an actual bottleneck.
- r0fl 6mo agoNot all businesses depend on milliseconds being shaved off the loading times For example: Ticketmaster makes a ton of money and their site is complete dogshit.
- afro88 6mo agoIt doesn't look like they think about how to make it fit though. They just use a known good go template
- 100ms 6mo agoNVME read latency is around 100usec, a SQLite3 database in the low terabytes needs somewhere between 3-5 random IOs per point lookup, so you're talking worst case for an already meaningful amount of data about 0.5ms per cold lookup. Say your app is complex and makes 10 of these per request, 5 ms. That leaves you serving 200 requests/sec before ever needing any kind of cache. That's 17 million hits per day in about 3.9 MiB/sec sustained disk IO, before factoring in the parallelism that almost any bargain bucket NVME drive already offers (allowing you to at least 4x these numbers). But already you're talking about quadrupling the infrastructure spend before serving a single request, which is the entire point of the article.
- f311a 6mo agoYou won't get such numbers on a $5 VPS, the SSDs that are used there are network attached and shared between users.
- 100ms 6mo agoNot quite $5, but a $6.71 Hetzner VPS # ioping -R /dev/sda --- /dev/sda (block device 38.1 GiB) ioping statistics --- 22.7 k requests completed in 2.96 s, 88.8 MiB read, 7.68 k iops, 30.0 MiB/s generated 22.7 k requests in 3.00 s, 88.8 MiB, 7.58 k iops, 29.6 MiB/s min/avg/max/mdev = 72.2 us / 130.2 us / 2.53 ms / 75.6 us
- 100ms 6mo agoRereading this, I have no idea where 3.9 MiB/sec came from, that 200 requests/sec would be closer to 8 MiB/sec
- TiredOfLife 6mo agoHetzner, OVH and others offer 4-8gb and 2-4 cores for the same ~5$
- littlecranky67 6mo agoI think we have to re-think and re-evaluate RAM usage on modern systems that use swapping with CPU-assisted page compression and fast, modern NVMe drives. The Macbook Neo with 8GB RAM is a showcase of how people underistimated its capabilities due to low amount of RAM before launch, yet after release all the reviewers point to a larger set of capabilities without any issues that people didn't predict pre-launch.
- sgt 6mo agoAlso, macOS is generally exceptional at caching and making efficient use of the fast solid state chips.
- f311a 6mo ago$5 VPS disks are nowhere near macbooks, they are shared between users and often connected via network. They don't seat close to CPU.
- ufocia 6mo agoMemory compression sounds like going back to DOS days. I think we're better off with writing tighter more performant code with no YAGNI. Alas, vibe coding will probably not get us there anytime soon.
- jlokier 6mo agoApple laptop CPUs have hardware memory compression and exceptionally high memory bandwidth for a CPU, and with their latest devices, very high storage bandwidth for a consumer SSD, so the equation is very different from the old DOS days.
- AussieWog93 6mo agoOr better yet, go with a euro provider like Hetzner and get 8GB of RAM for $10 or so. :) Even their $5 plan gives 4GB.
- arcanemachiner 6mo agoThey also have servers in the US (east and west coast).
- AussieWog93 6mo agoI don't think they offer their cheapest options (CX*) outside of Germany/Finland though. Singapore and USA are a bit pricier.
- walthamstow 6mo agoI've been using Linode for years and just yday went to use Hetzner for a new VPS and they wanted my home address and passport. No thanks.
- nlitened 6mo ago> There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM There is a good reason: teaching yourself not to over-engineer, over-provision, or overthink, and instead to focus on generating business value to customers and getting more paying customers. I think it’s what many engineers are keen to overlook behind fun technical details.
- locknitpicker 6mo ago> There is a good reason: teaching yourself not to over-engineer, over-provision, or overthink, (...) This is specious reasoning. You don't prevent anything by adding artificial constraints. To put things in perspective, Hetzner's cheapest vCPU plan comes with 4GB of RAM.
- sgarland 6mo agoIf I give you a box with 1 GiB of RAM, you are literally forced to either optimize your code to run in it, or accept the slowdown from paging. How is this specious?
- locknitpicker 6mo ago> If I give you a box with 1 GiB of RAM, you are literally forced to either optimize your code to run in it, or accept the slowdown from paging. How is this specious? It is specious reasoning. Self-imposing arbitrary constraints don't make you write good, performant code. At most it makes your apps run slower because they will needlessly hit your self-impose arbitrary constraints. If you put any value on performant code you just write performance-oriented code, regardless of your constraints. It's silly to pile on absurd constraints and expect performance to be an outcome. It's like going to the gym and work out with a hand tied behind your back, and expect this silly constraints to somehow improve the outcome of your workout. Complete nonsense. And to drive the point home, this whole concern is even more perplexing as you are somehow targeting computational resources that fall below free tiers of some cloud providers. Sheer lunacy.
- 6mo ago
- pier25 6mo agoWhere can you get 8GB for $20?
- ethbr1 6mo ago> There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM. By paying $20 instead of $5 you can get at least 8gb of RAM. In my head, I call this the 'doubling algorithm'. If there's anything that's both relatively cheap and useful, but where "more" (either in quality or quantity) has additional utility, 2x it. Then 2x it again. Repeat until either: the price change becomes noticeable or utility stops being gained. Tl;dr -- saving order-of single dollars is rarely worth the tradeoffs.
- layer8 6mo agoThe reason would be YAGNI. Apparently 1GB doesn’t constitute an actual limit for OP’s use case. I’m sure he’ll upgrade if and when the need arises.
- wackget 6mo ago> "There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM" > Immediately proposes alternative which is literally 4x the cost.
- redbell 6mo agoWhile I agree that the $15 difference won’t make any financial difference, I look at the numbers from another angle. The main idea here, as per my understanding, is to reduce the hosting cost as much as possible.