
Yes, You Can Run 18 Static Sites on a 64MB VPS - tshtf
http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/yes-you-can-run-18-static-sites-on-a-64mb-link-1-vps/
======
jonknee
There's no practical limit to the number of static sites you can host on a
64MB VPS. There is a limit to the amount of traffic that a 64MB VPS can serve,
but if you want to host 10,000 low-traffic sites then by all means go ahead.

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spitfire
Yes you can. We used to run whole webservers on 486DX/2-66's with 8megs
memory. Ran just fine.

Kids these days.

~~~
retree
Pfft - in my day we used to power our web servers using a potato:
<http://d116.com/spud/>

~~~
spitfire
touché.

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ddrager
Why not just 18... why not 48 or 128 or 1024? Questions like this are always
loaded. First of all:

\- This assumes the end user is familiar with command line usage. The typical
consumer of VPSes aren't, in my experience, and rely on something like cPanel
to do all administration. Which is why you can't really run on 64MB.

\- The site itself doesn't take up RAM, just disk space. If you have 1024
static sites the only thing taking up ram is the configuration of the sites
sitting in Apache's memory. As long as there isn't a lot of traffic on the
site, it doesn't really matter how many there are.

\- You could have 1 static site that has a medium amount of traffic and it
would bring the 64MB instance to its knees as soon as you have more than a few
concurrent connections.

Anyway, from this hoster's experience, when I get a question like "What can I
run on a 64MB VPS" the easy answer is "Not much" because usually the type of
person that wants to spend $3/mo on 64MB VPS instead of $7/mo for a 1GB VPS
doesn't really have their priorities in place.

~~~
duskwuff
> If you have 1024 static sites the only thing taking up ram is the
> configuration of the sites sitting in Apache's memory. As long as there
> isn't a lot of traffic on the site, it doesn't really matter how many there
> are.

And if you're smart about the setup, you don't even necessarily have to have a
separate configuration for each site. See mod_vhost_alias for Apache, for
instance. With that in place, memory is no longer an issue at all.

~~~
dmmcintyre3
Why would you use apache for static sites? Did you even read the article? It
uses lighttpd.

~~~
duskwuff
By way of example. I'm sure there's equivalent incantations for
lighttpd/nginx/flavor-of-the-week, the parent comment just happened to mention
Apache. :)

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jws
Memory is under your control, and if you can keep your content cached will
serve you well.

The catch with very small VPS slices for me is disk performance. Small slices
means more neighbors, and if a few of your neighbors are high disk use
applications your disk latency can get ugly. The nasty bit is you can
benchmark and check it all out when you move in, then a month later your site
is suddenly a dog.

CPU has the same dynamic, but I think the virtualization platforms do a better
job at "fair" for CPU, and if you are using nginx or lighttpd you don't need
much so should be treated well by the scheduler.

------
lsc
I sell 64MiB VPSs and there has been a lot of internal discussion on the
subject; should we continue selling them? As the article says, if you are
willing to put in the work, even 64MiB can be useful.

On the other hand, more ram gives you a lot more breathing room. It is _much_
easier to do useful things if you get the 128MiB service instead of the 64MiB
service. (I charge $4 per account, and $1 for every 64MiB ram, so 128MiB is
only a dollar more a month than 64)

Nick, an employee of mine, points out that the 64MiB guests are still useful
because they force people to learn about every process running on the box, and
to only run what is absolutely required. And he's right; that is a great thing
to learn. But it is also a lot of work.

------
jack12
Worth pointing out that the site behind this is itself running Wordpress on a
80MB VPS (plus swap): [http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/quickweb-7-128mb-xen-vps-
in-la...](http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/quickweb-7-128mb-xen-vps-in-la-
chicago-and-germany/#comment-31158)

That's an old article, but LowEndBox is a fun site for checking out the bottom
end of the VPS market, these days it's mostly only postings of very cheap
providers ($7/month limit) the blogger has been sent or seen on
WebHostingTalk. Then the ensuing discussion of how long until the company
behind it goes bankrupt. 64MB VPSes like this don't really get offered
anymore, while 128MB and 256MB offers are much more popular, usually in the
$15-$20/year range.

~~~
rs
> $15-$20/year

$15/$20 a YEAR ?

~~~
Kompottkin
Yup. :)

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yuvadam
I would argue that the most cheapest option for hosting static sites nowadays
is on S3.

At $0.14/GB and $1/million requests - I don't think you can get any cheaper.
Or reliable, for that matter.

~~~
mestudent
Your numbers are wrong, $0.14/GB is only for storage. The thing that will most
likely bite you depending on what kind of site you are hosting is the $0.15/GB
outbound transfers.

But yes it will still be cheap for most static sites like a jekyll blog or
something, if you ever reach more than 130 GB of outbound transfer you have
just reached the cost of an entry level linode with transfer of 200gb
included.

~~~
dmmcintyre3
My $3/month VPS has 500gb transfer, and it's not the cheapest around.

~~~
mestudent
What provider would that be?

~~~
cdx
Hostigation. Another good one would be BuyVM at $15/y =)

------
benatkin
I was disappointed that this article didn't have anything about traffic but
speculation. I expected it because of the title. There's no point to me in how
many static sites it can host if traffic isn't taken into account. As jonknee
said, it could host 10,000 low-traffic sites.

I also looked up the VPS mentioned in the article, and noted that it's not
really that cheap. There's only two price levels below $20, and $20/mo for
256MB isn't great. I got a tax-day special on Zerigo that amounts to about
$20/mo for 640MB, and RackSpace Cloud has 512MB for $21.90/mo. The author of
the article also mentioned getting a billing issue resolved, and I expect not
to have any billing issues in the first place for web hosting. I'm more
willing to give other types of services some slack but I think hosting
companies ought to have this one figured out.

~~~
Osiris
I found a Windows host with 1GB of RAM for just $8.00 at vpsport.com. That's a
heck of deal.

~~~
powertower
Nice try, VPSport.

~~~
cdx
Why must you assume that is spam? It could very well be from the front pages
of LEB.

~~~
Osiris
Yes, I'm not affiliated with them at all; I just found the deal on LEB and
opened a server and I just thought the price was fantastic for 1GB of RAM. In
fact, it's the cheapest 1GB of RAM I've ever seen. I think they can manage it
because they use Hyper-V dynamic RAM allocation. I've never seen that in
practice, it's really interesting to see. A kernel driver actually sucks up
the extra RAM you're not using if it's needed somewhere else.

------
newman314
As an alternate option, it's more than possible to run a static site on Google
App Engine (for free). Obviously, this is for low traffic and resource
requirements.

~~~
sixtyby3
Sure you could run dynamic sites as well.

But this isn't a VPS option.

------
brianwillis
_My personal favourite is Nginx (pronounced Engine X)_

I had no idea. I've been calling in "ninks" all this time.

~~~
kristofferR
I used to call it enjinx.

~~~
mixdev
Me too. And I am not going to change it.

------
tristanperry
Many hosts (and users of hosts) - including myself - over at WebHostingTalk
use/sell cPanel hosting a fair amount.

And naturally 64 MB of RAM would NOT be enough for a VPS running cPanel (or
any other mainstream server control panel, for that matter).

If the user is happy to use command line though then yes, he can run 18 static
sites on a 64 MB VPS.

His post doesn't mention whether he's happy to have a no-control panel VPS
though, so this entire blog post (well, the basis for it) does seem to be
predicated on a fairly big assumption...

Overall it's a good, informative post though.

~~~
bcl
Why the heck do you need a control panel to simply scp or sftp files over to a
virtual host?

~~~
jonknee
Many people in the market for such entry-level hosting don't have the know-how
to setup and manage accounts/virtual hosts.

~~~
norova
Those people in the market for entry-level hosting don't use a VPS, they use a
shared hosting service.

~~~
jonknee
They use whatever's cheap and then will ask for help.

------
ck2
Just wait until there are several active WP connections and then there is a
cache miss.

WordPress can sometimes use 32M to build a page.

That kind of setup is only useful where most of your visitors are NOT logged
in, since logged in users often cause cache-misses.

~~~
jonknee
The headline says "static sites". That means WordPress isn't being used.

~~~
kronusaturn
But the article talks about installing WordPress. So the confusion is
understandable.

~~~
cdx
"Kinda." The article says it might be possible to take it one step further to
run a low volume wordpress/basic PHP install.

------
Osiris
Has any VPS provider thought of building customized Linux distributions
specifically to reduce the memory footprint, preconfigured with
lightttpd/nginx, php, and mysql, all with pre-configured configuration
settings?

I find that most VPS hosts just install a standard distribution and expect the
customer to do all the work to reduce the memory footprint, or they install
memory hogging Apache + Plesk control panel configurations that are hard to
change.

I think one of these providers could make a great offering by having this type
of small VPS all pre-configured and ready to run as soon as it's provisioned.

~~~
chrismsnz
I believe that Virtualmin (a YC startup) is currently building[1] a control
panel with the ability to configure a low-memory setup.

1\. <http://www.virtualmin.com/node/11831#comment-51928>

------
mmaunder
I'd add that if the site is purely static (the example is a PHP site), you can
get away with 2MB to 8MB for Nginx and the rest will be filesystem cache and
OS. If you don't have too many files, CPU and network throughput will be your
only bottleneck and you can have unlimited domains.

------
mmaunder
This may not seem practical to many who have larger boxes, but much of this
advice is extremely useful when you're running a large cluster with millions
of hits a day and every spare ounce of memory you save translates into less
money for Dell. Great job!!

------
dmmcintyre3
My main VPS has 128mb RAM and is running a MyBB forum which gets 80k pageviews
a month. If I dropped the PHP, MySQL, IRC stuff and email server I could run
it on 16-32mb except when updating the software on the VPS.

------
dedward
"number of sites" isn't a metric you can design against - you know nothing
about the app requirements.

"number of static sites" is marginally better - the "number of sites" in that
case is meaningless - the limiting factor will be the request rate and desired
response time.

------
chrisjsmith
Pfft - Back in '00, I shifted a million requests a month across 22 static
(using SSI though) sites off a circa 1991 SparcStation 2 (weitek 80MHz
upgrade) with 64Mb, NetBSD, thttpd and a couple of 4.3Gb SCSI2 disks. It
finally gave up in 2002 when the AUI port decided it'd had enough of
electrons.

I reckon you could do that with one eye shut on even the crappiest VPS.

------
iphoneedbot
AGGHHH!!! This is CLEARLY a very well DISGUISED ad-article/spam. Im so angered
when I see an article that has "WebHostingTalk", "Discount", "Heres how
you..."

Its so painful to see this on HN!

P.S. @spitfire -- Yeah.. thems were the days! ___goes to show you how old_ I
am

~~~
jack12
The title and text, etc. are all directly responsive to the linked
contemporary WHT thread where someone asked about a 64mb plan on this specific
service, and if it would be enough for 18 static sites. The WHT commentators
all said no.

I'd be inclined to believe it is _not_ spam. Mainly because sites designed as
hosts for ad-articles/spam don't tend to build up communities or stick around
this long (this article is over 2 years old).

But also because the site covers multiple providers, not just this one,
sometimes favourably, sometimes not, always without any real benefits to the
owner. It does provide a (presumably no longer valid) referral code for the
particular service discussed in this one article, but it's an extra click away
from this page, and the site goes to _very_ large pains to point out it is a
referral code: [http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/vpslink-february-sale-
and-10-o...](http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/vpslink-february-sale-and-10-off-
referral-discount/)

Also, to my knowledge, that is the only time this site has ever used any sort
of referral code, and it was fully highlighted and explained. It also wasn't
an affiliate code, it could only have been used to cover the site's hosting
fees with a service the site owner had been using for the last 5 years.

Basically, it doesn't smell like spam to me. But, I have been enjoying the
site for a number of months before it appeared here, so I'm less suspicious.

~~~
iphoneedbot
@jack12 Fair- enough. Though, it still doesnt negate the end-effect; and, the
rising trend of flamebait titles on HN, and in fact has been discussed
continuously ~and~ on nearly daily basis.

