I suppose saying "full" is a bit clickbait, sorry, but it is 2026.
I just wanted to make a first post here, I wanted it to be fairly harmless while I learn the style of the dev.to community.
I wrote a guide on getting a desktop up and running in a tiny TierHive instance that costs $0.10 /month
While I understand, it's not going to be anyone's daily driver, with the INSANE cost of RAM these days, because we enjoy making cat liberache band videos with AI, I thought it would be a trip down memory lane or a point of interest to go in reverse and see what you can do on essentially nothing.
My goal was simple 1vCPU Core, 128mb ram, 1GB Disk, let me tell you... sacrifices had to be made.
These micro instances are available for people who want to run old school irc bots, or websockets that need no ram, lots of headless, just needs to be on, hardly does anything type situations, and I thought.. well that's as low as it goes, what can I do?
The technical details are linked in the blog post in the guide link in the 3rd paragraph I will spare you the trauma here and just get straight to the screenshots :D
And i had a further play as I wondered how much more usable I could get it with 256mb ram, and the answer is, pretty usable:
You have to get up to about 512mb before Firefox ESR will even think about running, though:
Anyway bit of a departure perhaps from the usual post here from my initial scan?
Just a bit of fun I hope.
The point of it was to start to reintroduce the idea of doing more with less, not every stack needs 8GB RAM and 12 vCPU cores, if you put the work in, you can SERIOUSLY reduce your platform costs.
TierHive takes the effort out of that, and is low end, low cost, not trying to be enterprise by design and hourly, you really ONLY pay for what you use, it comes with free sql offloading, free email relay, free load balancing and automatic failover, free reverse proxy and SSL/SNI at the edge. Designed from the ground up by a couple of old admits who are sick of 8000 options per page cloud solutions that are designed to empty your bank account for the sake of hosting a widget.
Any questions or comments are welcome.
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