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Comment by git-pull | Hacker News Reader

For reference, DigitalOcean's $5/mo droplets have 512MB memory [1]. This will crash if you're building a golang projects like gogs or C extensions in node or python. YMMV, but I had to bump on DO droplets to 1gB memory for installation, even if 512mB could do it while running.

Linode is top tier. Support is great. Interface makes sense. Instances are fast. One of the things that led me to DO was the $5/mo instances though. It's hard to resist a cheap personal server you can host all your legacy projects stuff on.

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#droplet

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As someone with 5-10 active Go projects in production, may I ask why you're compiling on the server? I use cross-compilation to build locally then sync to the server. Am curious to understand other use cases.

> I use cross-compilation to build locally then sync to the server.

I don't have a lot of prod code in golang. It's just a gogs server, the rest of is in other languages. All of which the best practice is pulling down requirements (some of which build c-extensions against headers which versions differ) on the server.

As a side note gogs has been really great. For those who don't know you can grab it at https://gogs.io/.

> Linode is top tier. Support is great. Interface makes sense.

Should be mentioned though that it hasn't always been this way. Before they rebuilt their management infrastructure they were hacked a couple of times and their response was... Not great: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552756

They've made a lot of progress since then but they were also DDoSed quite heavily recently which brought a lot of downtime.

Scaleway offering €2.99 2GB ram VPS, you can also check them out. Though their servers are hosted in Paris & Amsterdam.

It was also a pleasant surprise seeing a Brad Fitzpatrick testimonial on their homepage https://www.scaleway.com/

The difference in price is also a difference in reliability, scaleway doesn't use ECC memory, but linode does.

How much of a problem is that in practice?

Well I don't know of any statistics, since the server market don't normally use non-ecc memory. And it get more complicated when these errors aren't noticed before its too late.

I've seen this issue twice myself, so I'd say it's probably more common than we'd want it to be.

+1. You can't compile node on 512MB of memory. You need to allocate swap to do so.

> YMMV, but I had to bump on DO droplets to 1gB memory for installation, even if 512mB could do it while running.

Alternatively you could just add a swap file.

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