Lowest Spec VPS to run Ruby on Rails

ruby-on-rails ruby vps
Joseph picture Joseph · Apr 16, 2012 · Viewed 9.4k times · Source

I want to get started with my first Ruby on Rails application.

It will pull an image, and some text about the image display both, and have a small box to write some text about the image, which will then be written to a database once submitted.

It's unlikely to have any more than 5 concurrent users, as it's a personal project.

What's the lowest VPS spec needed to run ruby on rails? Would it be possible on 64mb (128 burst) ram or could I go even lower?

Answer

tadman picture tadman · Apr 17, 2012

The lowest I'd advocate is a 512MB system. The Ruby on Rails stack can be 50-100MB alone unless you're very careful about pruning off extras. This is an inconsequential amount of memory on a modern system, though, where 4096MB is common even in the VPS world.

Linode offers a $19.95 plan for the basic 512MB system which, while not the cheapest around, is very affordable even for personal projects. There are less expensive providers, but their quality of service may vary considerably.

If you're using Passenger then even a 512MB machine can run several lightly loaded sites.

Instead of running your own VPS you might want to use Heroku which doesn't allocate memory to customers directly but instead shares of CPU time they call "Dynos" that are somewhat more abstract than a VPS.

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