[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.

[St-Clock]

"This assumes the end user is familiar with command line usage. The typical consumer of VPSes aren't"?

What? I thought it was the opposite, i.e., that typical VPS customers were familiar with a command line or had to get familiar pretty quickly :-) Do you have any data or experience to back this claim (I ask because I don't have any data to back my perception)? Maybe you are referring to managed VPS as opposed to unmanaged VPS?

Btw, the article is 2 yrs old so (should have been in the summary...).

[mikeryan]

I'm sure I could think about this more and figure it out, but its a lazy Saturday. If you aren't comfortable at the command line to the point where you need something like cPanel then whats the point of using a VPS over shared hosting? I pay something ridiculous like $8 a month for dreamhost just to host a few sites I don't want to deal with. (Note I also run a VPS for other things - but I maintain it myself from a prompt)

[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. :)

[cdx]

Agreed. Using apache on a lowendbox is not a smart idea. Lighttpd serving static sites takes ~5MB in practise. That's also including a SSHd and other services.

[dmmcintyre3]

a $7/month 1gb VPS is going to be really oversold in ost cases. My 128MB VPS is $3 a month and runs my MyBB forum great.

Apachebench on the 128mb VPS to a static page: Document Path: /index.html Document Length: 1046 bytes

Concurrency Level: 100 Time taken for tests: 0.843 seconds Complete requests: 10000 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 12630336 bytes HTML transferred: 10510208 bytes Requests per second: 11867.44 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 8.426 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 0.084 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 14637.67 [Kbytes/sec] received

[duskwuff]

$7/month for 1GB is beyond just oversold -- at that price, it's probably an outright scam -- e.g, the server was stolen, your memory is all swapped out, /proc/meminfo is lying to you, or something of the sort. prgmr.com is one of the cheapest VPS providers I've ever seen, and $7/mo only gets you ~192 MB with them. While I'm sure they do leave some room for profit, it beggars disbelief that anyone can provide actual service at a third of their (already low) prices.

[IgorPartola]

I have had my share of cheap VPS's and in my experience you can find good value at $7/box. Rule of thumb is to go with Xen PV and to always pay monthly. There are some exceptions. For example BuyVM has a $15/year offer for 128 MB that is not oversold.

[toni]

Not only are they oversold to the extreme, but majority of them only offer OpenVZ. As opposed to prgmr's pure Xen approach.

[cdx]

The title at the top was because (if you read the article) the blog post spurred from a post on WebHostingTalk asking the community if it was possible to host 18 static sites on a 64MB VPS. A lot of people said no, so this post was made to disprove them.