Quite often people tend to think that they can host many applications on a small VPS. When I say small, I mean a VPS with 128MB of RAM. For people that are new to virtual servers, it’s hard to understand what they need to host a few of their websites or applications.

One of the best ways to think about this is by thinking about your own computer. Would you be able to do a lot of things on a computer running with only 128MB of memory? Of course you couldn’t! The same applies with a VPS as it’s basically a server (a fast computer in a datacentre) running your applications of choice (generally Apache, MySQL etc).

If you have a VPS with 128MB of memory then the most it could host is a few static websites. If you install MySQL and start using it, you’re going to end up with problems. You could optimize MySQL, but to be honest it’s best to upgrade to more memory if the site is important to you.

I always recommend that a VPS with at least 256MB of memory is used if you plan to host websites. A website that requires MySQL can easily use more than 128MB of RAM, and cause your website to go offline a lot. You can check this by simply typing the command free –m to see how much memory is available. If you’re constantly having problems with your websites when using a VPS, you can also check the user beancounters to see if a limit set by your provider is causing the problems. To do this simply type the command cat /proc/user_beancounters in SSH. This will list your limits and which limits have been hit a lot on the end column. If it’s mostly related to memory then you need to upgrade the VPS with more memory.

Obviously, the best way to find out how much memory you actually need is by testing. Many VPS providers will be happy to assist you when you’re having problems, so don’t be scared to ask them a question or two when you need some help. It’s usually faster to ask your provider some questions when you’re experiencing problems, since after all they’ve possibly seen the problem before and can assist you better.

I hope this post helps people understand VPS’s a bit more. Feel free to leave comments with questions and I’ll aim to answer them the same day, or even do some more posts with the answers depending on the questions.

A lot of people still do not understand what a VPS actually is. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server and as the name suggests, it’s basically a server. A VPS is similar to a Dedicated Server but at a fraction of the cost. You are allocated Disk Space, Memory and Bandwidth by your provider. CPU isn’t usually an issue so most providers will give you equal share of the CPU utilizing the virtualization software’s fair-share system.

With a VPS you have full root access with your own choice of Linux distribution. This means you can install your own software such as cPanel for web hosting or SHOUTcast for media streaming. Most applications that can be installed on Linux, can also be installed on a VPS as long as they don’t require a lot of memory.

My preferred virtualization software is OpenVZ as it has better performance, uses fewer resources than other virtualization software and has excellent stability.