A gigabyte is plenty

There’s a recurring instinct to rent a machine far larger than a project needs. For a static site, a gigabyte of RAM is roughly two orders of magnitude more than required.

The serving path is short: a request arrives, a file is read from disk, bytes go out. The only long-lived processes are the proxy and the operating system itself.

Where the memory actually goes

• The container runtime: tens of megabytes.
• The reverse proxy: single digits.
• The kernel and base system: the rest of the idle footprint.

The real constraint isn’t memory, it’s attention. Every extra service is something to update, monitor, and eventually debug at an inconvenient hour.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade   # the whole maintenance plan