Show your stack: what’s running on your $3-5/mo VPS?

mikho

Curious what everyone’s squeezing out of their cheapest boxes. Always fun (and often humbling) to see how much people can pack into less than 1-2 GB of RAM.

Mine: [Hetzner/cloud/CX11
, e.g. “2GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 20GB NVMe”]
Running: [Ahsay backup server]
OS: [Debian]

Ram is a bit high on the CX11, more than I need/use. But that's what I had to work with.

Specifically want to hear: what’s the lowest-spec box you’re running something useful on, and what’s actually running on it? Curious what tricks people use to keep things lean — swap tuning, lightweight alternatives to the usual bloated stacks, anything unexpected you’ve gotten running on next to nothing.

Not interested in VPN setups for this one — plenty of those threads already, want to hear about everything else.

What’s on yours?

yoursunny

We operate a global scale Named Data Networking Network.
https://yoursunny.com/p/ndn6/
https://yoursunny.com/p/ndn6/map/

The ndn6 network currently consists of nine VPS nodes.
Prices range from $6/year to $100/3y, excluding free machines offered by sponsors.
(Poor @Advin , they charge us $6/year so they don't get sponsorship credits.)

rpqu

Nginx, Docker images with bloat removed, yt-dlp , ffmpeg. Then, POSIX, python scripts.

davide

VPS Price Tracker is made up of two processes using 200 MB RAM: 140 MB for Nodejs and 60 MB for the database. Storage requirement is 4 GB. It could almost run on an ARM router on top of a fridge.

rpqu

@davide said:
VPS Price Tracker is made up of two processes using 200 MB RAM: 140 MB for Nodejs and 60 MB for the database. Storage requirement is 4 GB. It could almost run on an ARM router on top of a fridge.

Then why you got problem with GC?

davide

@rpqu said:

@davide said:
VPS Price Tracker is made up of two processes using 200 MB RAM: 140 MB for Nodejs and 60 MB for the database. Storage requirement is 4 GB. It could almost run on an ARM router on top of a fridge.

Then why you got problem with GC?

VPS Price Tracker still runs on GC, their performance and stability are above average. The problem were the manual migrations, I posted a detailed walk-thru of the 16-hours restoration the first time it happened. But in essence, in VPS Price Tracker the database is coupled with the filesystem and it cannot work on EXT4, a rescue image preloaded with a custom kernel is required to begin the backup restoration from a remote ZFS. It was quite a bit of sunk time.

mikho

@rpqu said:
Nginx, Docker images with bloat removed, yt-dlp , ffmpeg. Then, POSIX, python scripts.

Bloat removed manually or do you have a setup script?

I remember back in the day on LET (this was in the really early days) there was a wiki with setup scripts and other installations manuals.

davide

@mikho said:

@rpqu said:
Nginx, Docker images with bloat removed, yt-dlp , ffmpeg. Then, POSIX, python scripts.

Bloat removed manually or do you have a setup script?

I remember back in the day on LET (this was in the really early days) there was a wiki with setup scripts and other installations manuals.

debootstrap doesn't install any package above a bare minimal console environment, the installed system is ~300 MB IIRC. My basement workstation was born out of debootstrap 15 years ago. Still standing.

david3

Several websites, nginx, php-fpm, postfix, dovecot, opendkim, nsd, unbound, asterisk, vsftpd, wireguard, shadowsocks,
and bunch of "self-hosted" type things: 4get, searxng, quetre, anonymousoverflow, rimgo, redlib, binternet.

I've got 3 vps with a custom scripted master-slave failover system, so it can automatically failover to one of the other systems.

# free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            1935        1161          88          66         947         774
Swap:           2046         479        1567

Actually, it's cheaper than $3-5/month. They're around $20/year +/- a few dollars.

rpqu

@david3 said:
Several websites, nginx, php-fpm, postfix, dovecot, opendkim, nsd, unbound, asterisk, vsftpd, wireguard, shadowsocks,
and bunch of "self-hosted" type things: 4get, searxng, quetre, anonymousoverflow, rimgo, redlib, binternet.

I've got 3 vps with a custom scripted master-slave failover system, so it can automatically failover to one of the other systems.

# free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            1935        1161          88          66         947         774
Swap:           2046         479        1567

Actually, it's cheaper than $3-5/month. They're around $20/year +/- a few dollars.

Are you hosting public instance?

@mikho said:

@rpqu said:
Nginx, Docker images with bloat removed, yt-dlp , ffmpeg. Then, POSIX, python scripts.

Bloat removed manually or do you have a setup script?

I remember back in the day on LET (this was in the really early days) there was a wiki with setup scripts and other installations manuals.

Yes, basic debloating is delegated to something that's better described as combination of script+tool. Further optimization is done manually (now accelerated with LLM AI).
I'm not really good at C compared to my friends, so I end up using POSIX and python.
Note: they're IOI materials

david3

@rpqu said:

@david3 said:
Several websites, nginx, php-fpm, postfix, dovecot, opendkim, nsd, unbound, asterisk, vsftpd, wireguard, shadowsocks,
and bunch of "self-hosted" type things: 4get, searxng, quetre, anonymousoverflow, rimgo, redlib, binternet.

I've got 3 vps with a custom scripted master-slave failover system, so it can automatically failover to one of the other systems.

# free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            1935        1161          88          66         947         774
Swap:           2046         479        1567

Actually, it's cheaper than $3-5/month. They're around $20/year +/- a few dollars.

Are you hosting public instance?

A public instance for the self-hosted stuff? On my main machines, no, they're private. But I run some public instances separately (307200.xyz). The public instances run on 1gb ram.

cmeerw

My smallest VPS already has 3 GB RAM, but uses less than 1 GB.

Most of the VPSes run exim, slapd, PowerDNS (with sqlite3 backend), PowerDNS Recursor, and lighttpd. Got two VPSes running prosody (XMPP).

Got some simple self-made flask web sites (e.g., mailing list archive with full-text search using sqlite3), a roundup tracker using sqlite3 backend, a phpwiki (using sqlite3 backend) and some PHP scripts (mostly serving content from sqlite3 dbs). I guess the common theme here is that there is a lot of sqlite3 usage.

Ohh, and I do isolate web sites, but not using docker, instead just using bubblewrap (to only let these scripts access what they really need); this way I get the isolation without duplicating PHP/Python/... for each site (everything uses the system packages)

skorous

@cmeerw said: Most of the VPSes run exim, slapd, PowerDNS (with sqlite3 backend), PowerDNS Recursor, and lighttpd. Got two VPSes running prosody (XMPP).

Like a redundant Prosody or two separate instances?

AnthonySmith

I am running backtogeek.com in 32mb on alpine with 1GB disk, one day I will finish the project and release it.

a semi flat ini driven single binary that uses sqlite and 6 lines of js to run a hacker news clone and an unexposed microblog platform that is broken