Comment by f311a
8 hours 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.
$15 is not exactly zero, is it? If you don't need more than 1GB, why pay anything for more than 1GB?
I recall running LAMP stacks on something like 128MB about 20 years ago and not really having problems with memory. Most current website backends are not really much more complicated than they were back then if you don't haul in bloat.
It is. With 10k MRR it represents 0.15% of the revenue. Having the whole backend costing that much for a company selling web apps is like it’s costing zero.
You probably don't make 10k MMR on day one. If you make many small apps, it can make sense to learn how to run things lean to have 4x longer runway per app.
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Overspending for the sake of overspending is not smart in life or business.
Saving 15 USD on 10k+ USD MMR is ridiculous.
Saving 15 USD on 0 USD MMR while still building the business is priceless. Virtually infinite runway.
Given how much revenue depends on the experience of a web app and loading times, I’d be happy to pay 100$ 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.
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There’s a happy medium and $5 for 1GB RAM just isn’t it.
Be 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
Not a very strong argument now is it?
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NVME 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.
You won't get such numbers on a $5 VPS, the SSDs that are used there are network attached and shared between users.
Not quite $5, but a $6.71 Hetzner VPS
Rereading this, I have no idea where 3.9 MiB/sec came from, that 200 requests/sec would be closer to 8 MiB/sec
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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I 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.
$5 VPS disks are nowhere near macbooks, they are shared between users and often connected via network. They don't seat close to CPU.
Memory 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.
Also, macOS is generally exceptional at caching and making efficient use of the fast solid state chips.
Or better yet, go with a euro provider like Hetzner and get 8GB of RAM for $10 or so. :)
Even their $5 plan gives 4GB.
I'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.
They also have servers in the US (east and west coast).
I don't think they offer their cheapest options (CX*) outside of Germany/Finland though. Singapore and USA are a bit pricier.
The 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.
> "There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM"
> Immediately proposes alternative which is literally 4x the cost.
> 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.
It doesn't look like they think about how to make it fit though. They just use a known good go template
Where can you get 8GB for $20?
Hetzner, OVH and others offer 4-8gb and 2-4 cores for the same ~5$