Choosing & sizing
How much RAM does a VPS need?
Match RAM to the workload, not to a price tier. 1 GB runs a VPN, DNS resolver or small bot. 2–4 GB runs a small website with a database. 8 GB is the comfortable floor for a production application or Docker stack. 16 GB and up is for CI, large databases, Magento or heavy crawling.
RAM is the resource that fails hardest when it runs out: the kernel OOM killer terminates whatever it judges most expensive, which is usually your database. CPU exhaustion makes things slow; memory exhaustion makes things stop.
Operating system baselines matter at the low end. Alpine idles at roughly 80 MB, Debian at about 120 MB, Ubuntu at about 250 MB and Windows Server at roughly 1.5 GB. On a 1 GB instance that choice determines how much is genuinely yours.
| Workload | Minimum | Comfortable |
|---|---|---|
| WireGuard VPN, DNS, Tor relay | 512 MB | 1 GB |
| Static site or small blog | 1 GB | 2 GB |
| WordPress with database | 2 GB | 4 GB |
| Docker stack with Postgres | 4 GB | 8 GB |
| Minecraft, 10–20 players | 4 GB | 8 GB |
| Matrix Synapse, federated | 4 GB | 8 GB |
| CI runner, monorepo | 8 GB | 16 GB |
| Magento 2 in production | 8 GB | 16 GB |
| Windows Server + application | 4 GB | 8 GB |
7 answers in Choosing & sizing
- What is a VPS? A VPS (virtual private server) is a virtual machine with guaranteed CPU, memory and storage, running its own operating system on shared physical hardw…
- What is a VPS used for? A VPS runs anything that needs to be online continuously: websites and APIs, game servers, VPN and proxy endpoints, mail servers, trading bots, CI run…
- How much does a VPS cost? A usable VPS starts at about $4 a month for 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM and 20 GB of NVMe storage. A production instance with dedicated cores, 8 GB of RAM and…
- What is the cheapest VPS that is actually usable? About $4 a month buys 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM and 20 GB of NVMe on real KVM virtualisation. That is genuinely enough for a WireGuard VPN, a DNS resolver, …
- How many vCPUs does a VPS need? Most workloads need fewer cores than people buy. One shared core saturates a gigabit VPN link. Two dedicated cores run a busy website. Four run a game…
- How much bandwidth does a VPS need? Most projects use far less than they fear. A typical blog serving 50,000 monthly visits uses about 100 GB. A VPN carrying 1080p video for one person u…