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.
Their scale is simply too small to affect the market outside China, majority of their chips will be eaten up by HBM3 production with yet unknown yield rate.
They are forbidden to buy foreign equipment beyond their current process node, which is already obsolete, die size is 40% bigger than Samsung, not to mention lithography, the big 3 are using EUV while they are stuck with lobotomized DUV.
They can start making some decent money now, but vastly expanding capacity as is means enormous losses if the cycle went downward a few years later, that's how all previous makers went bankrupt.
They can squeeze out a bit more performance if they are ready to go beyond their current node using only domestic equipment and be blacklisted by the US government.
But the cap is there, unless they can make a working EUV machine in 5 years, they are doomed to be a minor player, if the current cycle even lasts that long.
>market that Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix are abandoning to chase the AI server market
These three have collectively committed what, approaching $50B towards construction of new facilities and fabs in response to the demand?
The memory industry has traditionally projected demand several years out and proactively scheduled construction and manufacturing to be able to meet the projected demand. The last time they did that, in the crypto boom, the boom quickly turned into a bust and the memory makers got burned with a bad case of oversupply for years. With that context, can you blame them for wanting to go a bit more slowly with this boom?
Sure, the new fabs won't be up and at volume production until late 2027 / early 2028, but committing tens of billions of dollars to new production facilities, including to facilities dedicated to DRAM rather than NAND or HBM, is hardly 'abandoning'. They're pivoting to higher profit margin segments - rational behavior for a for-profit corporation - but thanks to the invisible hand of the (not quite as free as it should be) market, this is, partially, a self-solving issue, as DRAM margins soar while HBM margins compress, and we're already seeing industry response to that dynamic, too: https://www.guru3d.com/story/samsung-reallocates-of-hbm3-cap...
That's probably what is going to happen, it's a strategic opportunity for the Chinese government here, there's a big market demand that can fuel their domestic production capabilities that nobody wants to take.
I truly wish Chinese Ram manufacturers luck to fulfill this market. Seriously, the amount of ram and its downstream effects can be hardly understated imo. it really just starts impacting everything.
They will first fill the local demand for all their electronics manufacturing. Then their massive computer infra and AI. And if any is left, it will be bundled to local PC exporters like Lenovo.
I am very hopeful of CXMT. But then then it could take a while for them to ramp up production. Maybe by then, the AI bubble would've burst.
One problem with US sanctions is it could hurt US companies too, like in the case of cutting-edge EUV and CXMT. This is when China is actually a hero and not a villain.
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.
Btw, Hetzner seems to have slightly cheaper offer for such small VPSs, and their disk i/o is much better than at OVH. (My own tests; I always compare the storage speed)
I agree, I think the author had some thoughts in their head that they forgot to write down, because it feels like at least a few paragraphs making the connection are missing. Happens to me all the time when I'm writing something too honestly.
For providers like us, we have to lease IPv4. We came long after IPv4 was already depleted. IPv4 prices did go down. Despite that, the $15/year 128MB BuyVM plan is long-gone.
But for a new provider like us, we'd have to spend more than an established player like BuyVM or RackNerd who bought most of their servers pre-AI-boom.
I don't know if you can consider Netcup "small", but their RS 4000 G12 ("root server", basically a VPS with dedicated/guaranteed resources) costs ~€31 for a monthly contract for any location in Europe without VAT included.
It's 12 dedicated cores of a modern EPYC CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe.
I got that offer during their Black Friday sale and pay €25/month (price before VAT), plus the offer I got has a 2TB NVMe instead of the 1TB one.
I got a netcup 500 gb server 8 gigs ram 4v cpu and everything with my frugal nature with getting a 5 euro voucher and I was following/seeing their advent calendar too which offered 1 month free
so for 3 months, I got 1 month free, another month with the 5 euro voucher and essentially only paid for the last month.
I ended up paying 8$ in total for the 3 months. Although after the 3 months, I have to pay more around ~5-6$ per month but its still a recurring deal so I guess I might as well continue it (given I have setten everything up)
Some of it is definitely lose making as well to lock in. I usually try to see what gets me to buy a deal because i usually don't buy many things especially online and its usually within some deal concept where I feel like "winning" that I do.
But to be honest, I did some napkin math and honestly, at least for my VPS (although Its usually idle but I have hosted many services on it or experimented with it, its honestly pretty fun imo, I definitely feel so much more freedom imo somehow after getting a vps its hard to explain I suppose or maybe not idk)
But my napkin maths suggests that they lose quite a lot of money with atleast my deal in particular so I got better off getting this deal than say if I was netcup myself somehow (because they probably lose net money on my deal if I actually really use my allocated limits I guess) atleast for the 3 months but I feel like netcup's still one of the more cheaper options and I got a recurring discount deal with it too sooo I would still consider them to have only marginal profits over a long term deal as well.
SO I guess overall, this was a really profitable deal for me.
Your deal's pretty cool too, honestly at large scale. I have done scraping of lowendtalk and analyzed and done many decisions and infrastructural decisions and honestly I will say taht for anything somewhat large scale like you mention 32 gb or something, I found hetzner boxes to be the best/most referred to option & OVH kimsufi line is created to be the cheapest dedicated boxes.
But yeah regarding OVH i recommend this website that I found regarding OVH KS line or just in general https://checkservers.ovh
Just checked it right now and I see Xeon E-2274G 4c / 8t 4.4 GHz+ 32 GB DDR4 ECC 2666 MHz 2 x 960 GB NVMe for around 37-38 euros ish
Also Netcup's definitely not small. I looked at anexia group and I wouldn't constitute them as small. For understanding what small means I guess when I mean small, I mean lowendbox single shop providers and others.
Also regarding Netcup, its payment system was really ass from what I felt like. Like It was the first company which made me feel like I wanted to pay it money but I had to make a CCP or some account nad literally had to go through like 3-4 really long things imo which really made me say (wtf) in my head each time and frustrated me only to give me a stripe link in the end.
It had me so pissed that for 2-3 days one idea of simplifying its whole process and other such providers stuck in my head. Its payment / the whole process of I want to pay -> create account -> actually pay had like 5-6 maybe 7 steps or something and I seriously can't tell you how I frustrated I was but the deal was too lucrative lol
I 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.
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.
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.
Some dirt-cheap VPS maybe too unreliable to run anything serious, that's why they sell that for dirt cheap. And their consumers generally won't complain about sudden server reboots, because that's what expected for the price.
If they increase their prices, then many of their customers maybe better off just use Linode or DigitalOcean etc instead, as these vendors provides better guaranty on stability.
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?
Until recently I had a 4gb ram 80gb ssd+2tb hd VPS running debian in a Montreal data centre with a real use 700 mbit pipe to my city with a budget provider for the equivalent of $80USD/year. When fio speeds were slow they moved me to a less crowded server. I gave it up as don't need it and moved my personal sites back to NFS for peanuts a year and services to my NAS. The pricing, offsite storage for my backups, Canadian sovereignty, lack of perceived complexity with a big provider was all attractive. I'm a physician with a tech hobby and last serious tech work was in the LAMP days with perl and php. Trying to think of learning about AWS and screwing up usage based billing was daunting!
Much better prices, and simplicity. The power you get from Hetzner or Kimsufi is crazy compared to AWS.
If I need to host something small, I don’t want to mess around with the many permissions and quirks that are required to deal with AWS. It is often much easier to just setup the server on a standalone service.
Most of my customers (small VPS host here) don't like the companies behind AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, especially the amount of influence they have in the world and how they wield it. And the pricing often isn't that much different between a small VPS host and either a cloud provider or one of the larger VPS providers (Akamai/Linode, Digital Ocean, etc.) - larger providers have economies of scale, but smaller providers don't have as much overhead for paying sales and C-suite.
There's also the human touch in terms of who you talk to: a lot of the smallest VPS hosts are 1-2 people, both technical, so customer support = sysadmin = contact for everything.
If the only thing you need is "server, accessible via the internet, always online", and you're not interested in all the vendor lock-in masquerading as useful services offered by the big cloud providers, then small VPS hosts are 100% the way to go. For mid-sized servers they're cheaper (i.e., stuff that wouldn't be free on the big clouds, but not "I want a petaflop"), with more transparent pricing (I pay $12, every month. If I get inundated with traffic, I'll get cut off until I choose to pay more).
I could pay like 30 bucks a month for an absolutely overspecc'd VPS (64GB/16c) that would cost around 20X on AWS (According to ChatGPT; which sounds about right based on the last time I cared to even look into it)
Does it have a billion 9's of reliability? No, but I don't care, it has literally never not worked when I've used it
Customer Service so far has been human, but that will vary greatly for the provider
I also use a different provider for work related hosting, and the reduced latency of being within 20 ms of the DC has been probably the single biggest (perceived) perf improvement my users have ever seen, specially on the legacy webforms platform we recently decomissioned (We're a bit too geographically far for most Datacenters of most large providers)
I'd use digital ocean over AWS for any SMB or lean startup (so... anyone not attached to an infinite money hose that has to either scale to NEED AWS, or die trying) just because of 1) their UI not being broken glass you have to crawl over and 2) not having eight trillion features that make doing simple things hard and 3) pricing
A fixed plan that is not so flexible, not pay-as-you-go, but predictable and economical. Elastic cloud are elastic in terms of that you can change the compute you want, you can change the storage, either block or object, and you can use their premium network as much as you can, long as you have the money and got clearance on the end of the month. Scaling is therefore what those elastic cloud offers, albeit in a premium price.
Meanwhile, small service providers might not actually need those premium features, and just want something that is cheap and makes economical sense. They don't need the state-of-the-art hardware and just want something that works.
That's why while the AAGO (AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle) attracted a lot of big corpo, that is, almost all of Forbes 500s used them, DigitalOcean and Vultr, with their $5 plan, is those who won the small businesses.
I used a vps service hosted in a country with strong digital privacy laws to host a personal wireguard+pihole vpn. I could probably think up a decent argument why that privacy with the smaller guy was only nominal but I could absolutely think up a good argument why doing that on a big name would have no privacy guarantees at all, especially as someone who would be in the bottom rung payment-wise.
Never had problems with downtime and I payed, like, 40 bucks a year over 3 years. I think I had to restart the thing once because of something dumb I did on my end.
The only advantage is cheapness, for personal use.
If you’re a government agency or a company you don’t care about saving $14/month, you want a secure provider. And these hosts are not secure, you’re basically just on your own.
Small VPS hosts oversell like crazy and they offer much lower prices. Also their reliability might be worse, because they don't migrate VM between hosts.
Predictable and extremely low costs for less critical stuff. My 2 main ones are respectively around 4 and 8 EUR per _year_.
I use them to run wireguard to evade geoblocks when I'm travelling, a few redundant monitoring scripts alerting me of reachability issues of more critical stuff I care about, they serve as contingency access channels to my home (and home assistant) if my primary channels are down.
I get no support, no updates, it's all on me - which is fine, it allows me to stay current and not lose hands-on practice on skills which I anyway need for my job (and which are anyway my passion). I don't even get an entire IPv4 - I get.... 1/3000th of it? (21 ports, the rest are forwarded to other customers). Suits me fine.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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) but those types are unlikely to get any cheaper, for sure.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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) [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.
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.
ZenoArrow|1 month ago
filloooo|1 month ago
They are forbidden to buy foreign equipment beyond their current process node, which is already obsolete, die size is 40% bigger than Samsung, not to mention lithography, the big 3 are using EUV while they are stuck with lobotomized DUV.
They can start making some decent money now, but vastly expanding capacity as is means enormous losses if the cycle went downward a few years later, that's how all previous makers went bankrupt.
They can squeeze out a bit more performance if they are ready to go beyond their current node using only domestic equipment and be blacklisted by the US government.
But the cap is there, unless they can make a working EUV machine in 5 years, they are doomed to be a minor player, if the current cycle even lasts that long.
anonym29|1 month ago
These three have collectively committed what, approaching $50B towards construction of new facilities and fabs in response to the demand?
The memory industry has traditionally projected demand several years out and proactively scheduled construction and manufacturing to be able to meet the projected demand. The last time they did that, in the crypto boom, the boom quickly turned into a bust and the memory makers got burned with a bad case of oversupply for years. With that context, can you blame them for wanting to go a bit more slowly with this boom?
Sure, the new fabs won't be up and at volume production until late 2027 / early 2028, but committing tens of billions of dollars to new production facilities, including to facilities dedicated to DRAM rather than NAND or HBM, is hardly 'abandoning'. They're pivoting to higher profit margin segments - rational behavior for a for-profit corporation - but thanks to the invisible hand of the (not quite as free as it should be) market, this is, partially, a self-solving issue, as DRAM margins soar while HBM margins compress, and we're already seeing industry response to that dynamic, too: https://www.guru3d.com/story/samsung-reallocates-of-hbm3-cap...
dist-epoch|1 month ago
realusername|1 month ago
Imustaskforhelp|1 month ago
alecco|1 month ago
neelc|1 month ago
One problem with US sanctions is it could hurt US companies too, like in the case of cutting-edge EUV and CXMT. This is when China is actually a hero and not a villain.
dpedu|1 month ago
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|1 month ago
Unlike Fourplex.net which uses modern ASRock Ryzen 9000 servers, Qeru.net used older HPE DL360 Gen9 servers.
I gave 3GB of RAM for $3-4/mo then. But these servers weren't very fast. I ended up selling the business, and am happy I did.
kunley|1 month ago
winrid|1 month ago
Havoc|1 month ago
It goes on about DSL and dial-up for some reason?
And yes VPS providers are affected by ram shortage. Turns out things that need ram are affected by ram shortages. 5 stars for the insight
barrkel|1 month ago
jlund-molfese|1 month ago
miyuru|1 month ago
IPv4 shortages didn’t kill it, and I don’t think this will either.
neelc|1 month ago
But for a new provider like us, we'd have to spend more than an established player like BuyVM or RackNerd who bought most of their servers pre-AI-boom.
1970-01-01|1 month ago
Tiberium|1 month ago
It's 12 dedicated cores of a modern EPYC CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe.
I got that offer during their Black Friday sale and pay €25/month (price before VAT), plus the offer I got has a 2TB NVMe instead of the 1TB one.
megous|1 month ago
CPU launch price 11000 USD. RAM will likely be another 10000 USD
20000 / 8 customers / 40 USD/mo = 62 months just to recoup CPU and RAM let alone other components.
Weird, whenever I napkin math offers of any HW for renting, I get that I could buy it myself in 1-2 years of rent. Sometimes faster.
Do they not intend to recoup the costs of HW? :)
Imustaskforhelp|1 month ago
so for 3 months, I got 1 month free, another month with the 5 euro voucher and essentially only paid for the last month.
I ended up paying 8$ in total for the 3 months. Although after the 3 months, I have to pay more around ~5-6$ per month but its still a recurring deal so I guess I might as well continue it (given I have setten everything up)
Some of it is definitely lose making as well to lock in. I usually try to see what gets me to buy a deal because i usually don't buy many things especially online and its usually within some deal concept where I feel like "winning" that I do.
But to be honest, I did some napkin math and honestly, at least for my VPS (although Its usually idle but I have hosted many services on it or experimented with it, its honestly pretty fun imo, I definitely feel so much more freedom imo somehow after getting a vps its hard to explain I suppose or maybe not idk)
But my napkin maths suggests that they lose quite a lot of money with atleast my deal in particular so I got better off getting this deal than say if I was netcup myself somehow (because they probably lose net money on my deal if I actually really use my allocated limits I guess) atleast for the 3 months but I feel like netcup's still one of the more cheaper options and I got a recurring discount deal with it too sooo I would still consider them to have only marginal profits over a long term deal as well.
SO I guess overall, this was a really profitable deal for me.
Your deal's pretty cool too, honestly at large scale. I have done scraping of lowendtalk and analyzed and done many decisions and infrastructural decisions and honestly I will say taht for anything somewhat large scale like you mention 32 gb or something, I found hetzner boxes to be the best/most referred to option & OVH kimsufi line is created to be the cheapest dedicated boxes.
But yeah regarding OVH i recommend this website that I found regarding OVH KS line or just in general https://checkservers.ovh
Just checked it right now and I see Xeon E-2274G 4c / 8t 4.4 GHz+ 32 GB DDR4 ECC 2666 MHz 2 x 960 GB NVMe for around 37-38 euros ish
Also Netcup's definitely not small. I looked at anexia group and I wouldn't constitute them as small. For understanding what small means I guess when I mean small, I mean lowendbox single shop providers and others.
Also regarding Netcup, its payment system was really ass from what I felt like. Like It was the first company which made me feel like I wanted to pay it money but I had to make a CCP or some account nad literally had to go through like 3-4 really long things imo which really made me say (wtf) in my head each time and frustrated me only to give me a stripe link in the end.
It had me so pissed that for 2-3 days one idea of simplifying its whole process and other such providers stuck in my head. Its payment / the whole process of I want to pay -> create account -> actually pay had like 5-6 maybe 7 steps or something and I seriously can't tell you how I frustrated I was but the deal was too lucrative lol
bArray|1 month ago
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.
direwolf20|1 month ago
dijit|1 month ago
The "did we have X 10 years ago" argument also misses a a lot of modern software requirements. Yes, we had mid-range laptops and budget gaming PCs in 2016, but the memory footprint of everyday applications has exploded since then. Electron-based apps (Slack, Teams, VS Code, Discord) routinely consume 500MB-1GB+ each [5], and it's entirely normal to have multiple running simultaneously. A typical "light" workload in 2026 easily uses 2-3x the RAM that a comparable workflow needed in 2016.
So we're getting squeezed from both sides: applications demand more memory whilst memory itself costs more. An 8GB laptop was perfectly serviceable for office work in 2016; in 2026, it's borderline unusable with a few Chrome tabs and Teams open. The same kit that cost $55 in June 2025 now costs $150 [2, again]. That's a 150%+ increase in six months, pushing capable systems out of reach for budget-conscious users precisely when software bloat is making RAM more essential than ever.
[1] https://gamersnexus.net/industry/3212-ram-price-investigatio... [2] https://gamersnexus.net/news/ram-wtf [3] https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=ddr4+ram+8gb [4] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ [5] https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/
michaelt|1 month ago
Today, I can buy a "Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4 PC4-28800C18 3600MHz Quad Channel Kit" for £259.99 [2]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150303141114/http://www.overcl... [2] https://www.overclockers.co.uk/corsair-vengeance-lpx-32gb-4x...
conductr|1 month ago
layer8|1 month ago
nirui|1 month ago
Some dirt-cheap VPS maybe too unreliable to run anything serious, that's why they sell that for dirt cheap. And their consumers generally won't complain about sudden server reboots, because that's what expected for the price.
If they increase their prices, then many of their customers maybe better off just use Linode or DigitalOcean etc instead, as these vendors provides better guaranty on stability.
croes|1 month ago
saidinesh5|1 month ago
zeagle|1 month ago
xmcp123|1 month ago
If I need to host something small, I don’t want to mess around with the many permissions and quirks that are required to deal with AWS. It is often much easier to just setup the server on a standalone service.
piou|1 month ago
There's also the human touch in terms of who you talk to: a lot of the smallest VPS hosts are 1-2 people, both technical, so customer support = sysadmin = contact for everything.
OkayPhysicist|1 month ago
joseda-hg|1 month ago
Does it have a billion 9's of reliability? No, but I don't care, it has literally never not worked when I've used it
Customer Service so far has been human, but that will vary greatly for the provider
I also use a different provider for work related hosting, and the reduced latency of being within 20 ms of the DC has been probably the single biggest (perceived) perf improvement my users have ever seen, specially on the legacy webforms platform we recently decomissioned (We're a bit too geographically far for most Datacenters of most large providers)
atomicnumber3|1 month ago
stephenr|1 month ago
Outbound data pricing is a potentially huge saving.
AWS is as much as $90/TB outbound with 1GB free. Hetzner is $1.20/TB (in EU and US) with 1TB/20TB (US/EU) free.
(Good) Smaller places are more likely to have actual technical staff you can talk to.
qwertox|1 month ago
That is a nice way to have a static IP on the internet and enough resources to do small things like host a nameserver and/or OpenVPN/Wireguard.
I may have had 4 hours of downtime in one year, always announced days in advance.
stevefan1999|1 month ago
Meanwhile, small service providers might not actually need those premium features, and just want something that is cheap and makes economical sense. They don't need the state-of-the-art hardware and just want something that works.
That's why while the AAGO (AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle) attracted a lot of big corpo, that is, almost all of Forbes 500s used them, DigitalOcean and Vultr, with their $5 plan, is those who won the small businesses.
znpy|1 month ago
VPS services are usually really, really simple and fairly cheap.
I'd say that actually VPS prices is where we actually see computing prices going down rather than on the big 3.
AWS used to optimize further and pass down the savings to the customers back in the day, now they don't do it anymore.
b00ty4breakfast|1 month ago
Never had problems with downtime and I payed, like, 40 bucks a year over 3 years. I think I had to restart the thing once because of something dumb I did on my end.
graemep|1 month ago
AWS does offer Lightsail which is similar pricing.
MagicMoonlight|1 month ago
If you’re a government agency or a company you don’t care about saving $14/month, you want a secure provider. And these hosts are not secure, you’re basically just on your own.
renewiltord|1 month ago
I replaced with a home server and it costs way more just in power hahaha.
api|1 month ago
It’s weird because in most of this industry scale results in lower prices. Not in cloud.
buckle8017|1 month ago
Insanity|1 month ago
direwolf20|1 month ago
vbezhenar|1 month ago
charcircuit|1 month ago
ezequiel-garzon|1 month ago
drnick1|1 month ago
yomismoaqui|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
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ddtaylor|1 month ago
nicoburns|1 month ago
gruturo|1 month ago
I use them to run wireguard to evade geoblocks when I'm travelling, a few redundant monitoring scripts alerting me of reachability issues of more critical stuff I care about, they serve as contingency access channels to my home (and home assistant) if my primary channels are down.
I get no support, no updates, it's all on me - which is fine, it allows me to stay current and not lose hands-on practice on skills which I anyway need for my job (and which are anyway my passion). I don't even get an entire IPv4 - I get.... 1/3000th of it? (21 ports, the rest are forwarded to other customers). Suits me fine.
ReptileMan|1 month ago
iammjm|1 month ago
stevefan1999|1 month ago
tokyobreakfast|1 month ago
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.
nh2|1 month ago
ValdikSS|1 month ago
I still have 64 MB VPS (OpenVZ) which I use in production since 2012. It runs DNS, VPN, some logging stuff.
fjnfnrnfn|1 month ago
vbezhenar|1 month ago
Install can be tricky indeed, but if you have installed system, it's easier.
INTPenis|1 month ago
sschueller|1 month ago
nirui|1 month ago
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|1 month ago
PaulHoule|1 month ago
charcircuit|1 month ago
indigodaddy|1 month ago
JohnTHaller|1 month ago
imglorp|1 month ago
gravypod|1 month ago
CamperBob2|1 month ago
kkfx|1 month ago
- 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|1 month ago
[deleted]
t312227|1 month ago
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
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/
and
"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
ianseyler|1 month ago
Update: Fourplex (this host) uses a 1GB minimum.
lachiflippi|1 month ago
kube-system|1 month ago
Imustaskforhelp|1 month ago
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) [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.
MagicMoonlight|1 month ago
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.
OkayPhysicist|1 month ago
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.
RiverCrochet|1 month ago
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.