The Silent Killer of the Small VPS: Why the RAM Shortage is Redrawing the Cloud Map

If you’ve been following the discussions on Hacker News recently, you’ve likely noticed a growing sense of dread among small-to-medium VPS providers. The "Low-End Box" market - the $3-$5/month tier that fueled the indie web for a decade - is under existential threat.

The global memory shortage is no longer abstract. It is directly reshaping the economics of VPS hosting, especially at the low-end and independent provider tier. RAM - not CPU or storage (yet) - is now the binding constraint.

Most VPS providers enforce a 512 MiB to 1 GiB minimum RAM allocation per VM. This floor has nothing to do with customer workloads. It exists because modern Linux systems cannot reliably function below that range. Kernel overhead, init systems, logging daemons, page cache growth, and background services consume a large fraction of memory before the application even starts.

In a market where memory prices have spiked 4-5x, this is not inefficiency. It is structural waste.  

The Provider Profitability Trap

Recent discussions among VPS operators make the numbers explicit. A competitive modern server can cost $20,000, with $10,000 of that cost tied up purely in RAM. At $3-$5/month price points, recouping that investment can take years—before power, bandwidth, or support are considered.

Providers are being cornered into two losing strategies:
    •    Raise prices and lose competitiveness against hyperscalers
    •    Deploy decade-old hardware because older DDR3/DDR4 memory is cheaper

Both paths shrink margins. Neither addresses the core issue.

The industry is paying a tax it no longer questions: the Linux tax.

The 1 GiB Minimum Is a Legacy Artifact

The accepted minimum VM size is not driven by application needs. Most VPS workloads today are single-purpose services:
    •    APIs
    •    DNS nodes
    •    Edge services
    •    Control planes
    •    Microservices

These workloads do not need multi-user abstractions, shells, init systems, or general-purpose OS facilities. Yet they are forced to carry them.

The result is predictable:
    •    Hundreds of megabytes reserved but unused
    •    Artificial limits on instance density
    •    Customers paying for memory that never runs application code

This is not a tuning problem. It is an architectural mismatch.

BareMetal Exposes the Waste

BareMetal demonstrates how much of this memory usage is self-inflicted.

Written entirely in x86-64 assembly by Return Infinity, the BareMetal exokernel requires ~4–8 MiB of memory for the kernel. That footprint covers:
    •    CPU and interrupt initialization
    •    Memory management
    •    Minimal device support

There is no userspace. No init system. No background daemons. No shell. No growth over time.

All remaining memory allocated to the VM belongs exclusively to the application. Nothing competes for it. Nothing wakes up unexpectedly.

Functionally, this is a true unikernel model - without layered runtimes or language-level tax.

Density Changes Everything

On a host with 128 GiB of RAM:
    •    Standard Linux VMs
    •    ~1 GiB per instance
    •    ~120 instances per host
    •    OS overhead dominates memory usage
    •    BareMetal exokernel VMs
    •    8 MiB kernel footprint
    •    Bottleneck shifts to CPU or I/O
    •    Thousands of instances fit within the same memory envelope

Even allocating a conservative 32 MiB per instance yields a 32x density increase compared to 1 GiB Linux VMs.

This is not theoretical. It is arithmetic.

The Memory Shortage Is Revealing the Cost of Old Assumptions

VPS providers are not running out of RAM because applications suddenly became bloated. They are running out because the platform model wastes memory by default.

General-purpose operating systems were never designed for dense, memory-constrained virtualized environments. The current shortage is forcing that mismatch into the open.

Exokernels and true unikernel architectures are no longer niche experiments. They are a rational response to hard resource pressure.

When the kernel fits in single-digit megabytes and everything else belongs to the application, the economics of virtualization change. In a memory-limited world, that difference determines who survives.

Ready to maximize your hardware? Explore how BareMetal OS can transform your infrastructure density.