Limited Memory For One Website

Is 1GB VPS Good Enough

Can 1GB RAM Support the Load Requirements of a Medium Sized Website

    Memory Required to Power a Medium or High Load Website

    Website Speed 02

    A GIG of random access memory sounds good for a starter VPS but is it capable to support a busy website?

    Not every website is same, a properly optimized fast loading website will consume less resources vs a poorly coded one. For this reason, it is very difficult to understand the memory and processing power requirements of a website. Some sites tend to use more of CPU and less of RAM while some are vice-versa. Also, a poorly built website with memory leaks may not be able to survive even a dedicated server or high memory VPS, so here, we will be talking about 1GB VPS in regards to supporting a web optimized website.

    Ideally, no matter which server you are going to use, every server can be fully tweaked to perform way better than the barebone installation one, but very few know the real potential of their server.

    Optimizing Low Memory Vps

    A 1GB Virtual Private Server to host a medium traffic website is usually a challenge, the challenges are not related to coding or memory usage in normal situations, but a sudden spike in traffic can cause your VPS to run sluggish. A sudden traffic can be a bot scanning your website, or your competitors scrapping your website to know about your SEO, or a scrapper fetching your website content, or an attack on your web server port can cause sudden boost of traffic affecting your website. So again, the question is, can your host your data on a 1GB server.

    For hosting on limited amount of memory, you will need to optimize your server completely. If you are using cPanel, then there are few settings in cPanel to speed up things, then you can turn off services that you are not using such as if you are not using it as a mail server and are using SMTP connections on your website to send email, then it would be good to disable email service on your server Also, if your server is not hosting DNS and you are using third party DNS provider, then you could save some memory by turning off DNS server. Also, if you are using Apache web server for your hosting, then you need to carefully choose your PHP handlers, as some PHP handlers offer security while other offer speed.

    Also there are some caching techniques that can be used, one will be a server level cache such as opcache which allows PHP to run multiple times faster on a system with thousands of PHP files. Other can be a page cache technique that would allow your system to save a static version of the dynamically generated page and serving that static file on subsequent requests. Apart from local caching, there are options available to cache your website images on CDN to save some bandwidth and also reduce requests for resources to your VPS thus reducing memory footprint.

    No matter if you are on a 1GB VPS or a 8 GB one or even on a dedicated server with 128GB RAM, there are so many optimization techniques that can be utilized to reduce TTFB and get the website to load faster. Let us know if you need your server optimized for high performance.