How much RAM do self-hosted apps really need? We measured.
Hosting-provider blogs will tell you that you need a 2–8 GB VPS to self-host almost anything. They sell the VPS, so of course they do. We started each of these apps ourselves, on bare metal with default config, and recorded what the process tree actually used. The short version: most popular self-hosted apps idle under 200 MB, and a $4–6/month 1 GB instance runs several of them at once.
Build your stack, get a RAM number
Tick the apps you actually plan to run. The total uses our measured idle figures plus 300 MB for the OS, then adds 30% headroom because idle is not the number you size for.
| App | What it is | Measured idle RSS | Smallest sane VPS |
|---|---|---|---|
| File Browser | Web file manager | 16 MB | 512 MB |
| Gotify | Self-hosted push notifications | 20 MB | 512 MB |
| ntfy | Pub-sub push notifications | 27 MB | 512 MB |
| PocketBase | Backend-as-a-service (DB + auth + API) | 31 MB | 512 MB |
| Caddy | Web server / reverse proxy (automatic HTTPS) | 40 MB | 512 MB |
| Navidrome | Music streaming server | 47 MB | 512 MB |
| Syncthing | File synchronization | 57 MB | 512 MB |
| Prometheus | Metrics database / monitoring | 70 MB | 1 GB |
| MinIO | S3-compatible object storage | 132 MB | 1 GB |
| Uptime Kuma | Uptime monitoring | 136 MB | 512 MB (tight) / 1 GB (comfortable) |
| Gitea | Git hosting / software forge | 158 MB | 1 GB |
| Forgejo | Git forge (Gitea fork) | 173 MB | 1 GB |
| code-server (VS Code in the browser) | Cloud development environment | 191 MB | 1 GB (idle) — but plan for 2 GB in real use |
Each app page explains what changes under real load — that's where sizing actually gets interesting, and where the honest answer is sometimes "buy more RAM" (looking at you, code-server).
Methodology
Each app was started with its default configuration and an empty data directory, left to settle for 25–30 seconds, and confirmed alive with an HTTP request to its web interface. We then recorded the resident set size (RSS) of the app's entire process tree via ps. Apps were run directly on the host (no Docker), so numbers exclude container overhead (~10–30 MB with Docker).
A fresh minimal Ubuntu 24.04 VPS typically idles at roughly 200–300 MB RSS (kernel, systemd, sshd, journald). All 'fits on' verdicts below assume ~300 MB reserved for the OS.
Picking a VPS
Any provider's smallest tiers handle the apps above. As of August 2026 the usual suspects for cheap, reliable small instances are Hetzner, Vultr and DigitalOcean — pick whichever has a region near you; for these workloads the performance difference is noise compared to picking the right RAM tier.