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Comment by misterbwong | Hacker News Reader

What does everyone use these low-end plans for? Seeing the interest in this thread has gotten me curious.

Proof-of-concept project for work -- ported a Weblogic Java web app from work server to JBoss on Linode -- worked beautifully.

I closed my account a few days ago when I realized I hadn't touched it in a couple of months, but the $10 will probably lure me back. It's nice having an extra vps or two for testing/backups etc.

VPSes with 1 GB of RAM are more than enough to host a couple of web apps (depending on traffic of course) with Python, PHP, or similar setups. When Linode started out, their bottom offering was actually 512 MB if I remember correctly, and SliceHost (later Rackspace Cloud) had 256 MB offerings.

From a quick peek at their announcements from long ago, it looks like they used to run 64MB as the smallest size, but this was, of course, back in 2003/2004.

Until 2008 or 2009, they were also still using UML, instead of XEN.

A staging environment replicating on one box what runs on four in production. It's only using 650MB of the 1GB RAM so the 2GB box it was on was more than required.

Personally I run a Ventrilo server on a free-tier AWS. Better than paying for a lifetime server with only 5 slots, considering mine is unlimited, free for the first year, and probably under $5 a month after that (plus it's always good to know I have an always-available Linux server outside my LAN for various reasons, so that makes the $5 a month worth it when the free plan ends).

A minecraft server so that my kids can play with a couple of their friends.

I'd be interested in this - how easy was it to set up, is there an image or something that one can use so I don't have to worry about iptables rules and things but can just spin up an instance and go?

I spin up a lot of these low end instances for testing and small projects.

database replication, elasticsearch, log repositories, headless workers...

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