ubuntu-post-install/docs/vps-sizing-recommendations.md

VPS sizing & recommended services

Reference notes from sizing this repo's services against real VPS plans. Not project documentation for contributors — a planning record for picking services against a given vCPU/RAM/disk budget.

How to size a VPS for this repo's services

For this class of self-hosted workload (web apps, a PBX, a few Docker containers — no video transcoding, no ML inference), RAM is almost always the binding constraint, not CPU or disk. CPU only matters once something is transcoding video, mixing many conference audio streams, or running local AI inference — none of which apply to most services in this repo. Disk only matters once local media storage is involved.

Rough per-service RAM budget, idle:

Kind of service	~RAM
OS + Docker daemon baseline	300-500MB
JVM apps (Traccar, UniFi)	350-500MB
App with its own Postgres/MariaDB (Mattermost, Nextcloud, Immich)	+150-250MB for the DB alone, on top of the app
Lightweight single-binary apps (Go/Rust — ntfy, vaultwarden, wg-easy, homebox, actualbudget, syncthing, portainer, coturn)	20-150MB each
Headless-Chrome-backed apps (archivebox, changedetection's JS mode)	300-500MB+

Rules of thumb:

• Keep at least 25-30% of total RAM free at idle for burst load (image pulls, log bursts, concurrent call/session spikes).
• A swapfile is cheap insurance below ~2GB RAM. services/asterisk.sh already automates this for droplet installs ≤2GB — the same logic applies to any small box running more than one service.
• Sharing one coturn instance (services/coturn.sh) instead of letting each WebRTC-capable service (Asterisk, Mattermost) embed its own saves a container per consumer and — more importantly — avoids relay-port collisions between them.

Tier 1 — ~1 vCPU / 1GB RAM / 25GB SSD

Example: DigitalOcean Basic, $6/mo.

This is tight enough that Docker's own daemon overhead is already a meaningful fraction of the box. Pick one purpose, not a stack:

• Option A — Asterisk only. Asterisk + the shared coturn service fits comfortably per this repo's own droplet-sizing notes (services/asterisk.sh README section) — a swapfile is added automatically on droplets ≤2GB, and this plan is "fine for a couple of extensions and light personal use."
• Option B — a lightweight utility box. Caddy + CrowdSec + NetBird (all near-zero RAM) plus at most one or two of the smallest apps (ntfy, vaultwarden, wg-easy) — total comfortably under 500MB.

Avoid on this tier: anything with its own database (Mattermost, Traccar, Nextcloud), more than one substantial app, media/AI/gaming services. There's no headroom for a second heavy thing once the first one is running.

Tier 2 — 4 vCores / 4GB RAM / 120GB NVMe

Example: IONOS VPS M+, $11/mo. This is the tier actually planned out in detail — see the recap below.

What I was planning for the IONOS 4 vCPU / 4GB / 120GB box

Reconstructed from the sizing conversation, in the order decisions were made:

Core stack (the original ask):

• caddy — reverse proxy / HTTPS
• crowdsec — intrusion prevention
• asterisk — PBX, using the shared coturn service (not embedded)
• mattermost × 2 — genuinely isolated instances (separate dir/containers/DB per instance), both sharing the one coturn service — this required merging PR #265 (claude/droplet-capacity-assessment-s2voix), which extracted coturn into services/coturn.sh and added real multi-instance support to services/mattermost.sh; merged into main at commit 6151ede
• traccar — GPS tracking

Validated call load: up to 9 concurrent Asterisk calls, at most 1 Mattermost call at a time, 0 screen share. Comfortably within budget — no transcoding/conferencing/heavy-video load in this profile, so CPU has large margin and RAM sits around 2.0-2.7GB idle with the core stack alone.

Utility adds, agreed:

• ntfy, wg-easy, portainer, syncthing, homebox, actualbudget, mealie

Explicitly declined: vaultwarden

Remote / cross-VLAN access: NetBird — hosted control plane (not self-hosted), client-only, with its embedded SSH server enabled (--allow-server-ssh, JWT/OIDC-based user auth, no user SSH keypair to manage). Already implemented in services/base.sh (_base_setup_netbird()) as part of every box's base install — nothing further to build for this. Chosen over self-hosting a WireGuard mesh once it was clear that (a) a hub-routed WireGuard design makes the VPS a single point of failure for inter-peer connectivity specifically, not just VPS access, and (b) a different person ever needing access means hand-editing authorized_keys on every box instead of revoking centrally — NetBird's actual value here is solving both, not just being "zero-config."

wg-easy's role, narrowed: kept in the utility-add list, but as a local-VLAN WireGuard testing ground, not the primary remote-access path — that's NetBird's job. The hub-routed peer mesh (WG_ALLOWED_IPS=0.0.0.0/0 by default, so any two enrolled peers already reach each other through the VPS with no per-pair config) plus a sync-ssh-aliases.sh companion script (reads peers straight off the live WireGuard interface via wg show, generates ~/.ssh/config Host aliases) is already built and pushed (claude/vps-capacity-assessment-r57vw3, commit 4a0ec63).

Floated, not yet decided: running lyrion (music) and/or audiobookshelf on the VPS with HTTPS via Caddy, but pointing them at a home-hosted library over a VPN tunnel instead of storing media locally — architecturally sound (both services already just bind-mount a host path; point it at a network-mounted share instead) and avoids the disk/CPU tradeoffs of a local media library, but real bandwidth depends on home upload speed, which wasn't checked.

Explicitly out of scope for this box (wrong fit, not "can't run"):

• Local media servers storing media on the VPS (emby, jellyfin, immich, audiobookshelf/lyrion without the home-library-over-VPN approach above) — disk-hungry, and transcoding CPU load risks contending with active calls.
• AI stacks (ai-stack, ai-gpu, iopaint, paintplus) — need real VRAM/RAM most VPS plans don't have.
• Gaming (minecraft, wolf, wolf-pair, sunshine, kyber-*) — CPU/RAM heavy; cloud-gaming ones need GPU passthrough.
• Cameras/NVR (frigate*, sky-cam) — needs real camera feeds; doesn't make sense geographically on a VPS.
• nextcloud + onlyoffice — the combined PHP+DB+office-suite stack alone would likely eat most of the remaining headroom.
• unifi — only worth ~300-500MB of Java if actually managing Ubiquiti gear from this box.
• SSH ProxyJump/bastion-hop chaining for reaching genuinely isolated (CGNAT, no local peer) boxes — a good idea in principle, parked for later since NetBird already covers the current need.