Choose the right VPS plan

Picking a plan comes down to three things: memory, CPU and disk space, plus how much traffic you expect. This guide helps you estimate what you need, then shows how to check what you actually received once your server is running.

Before you begin

• A rough idea of what you want to run, such as a personal website, a small web app or a game server.
• Access to the LightServe plan page, where the current specifications for each plan are listed.
• Nothing installed yet. The checks in this guide run on your server once you can log in over SSH.

Step 1: Work out what you plan to run

Different workloads stress different parts of a server. A static website barely uses anything, while a database-driven site or a game server can use a lot of memory. These starting points are rough guides, not guarantees:

• Static site or small blog: 1 CPU core and 1 GB of memory is often enough.
• Dynamic site with a database (for example PHP and MariaDB): plan for 2 GB of memory or more.
• Small Minecraft server: memory is the main limit. Java-based game servers commonly want 2 GB or more.
• Several apps or containers: start at 4 GB of memory and measure from there.

Step 2: Compare the plans

LightServe offers plans named Wisp, Cirrus and Nimbus. Compare their CPU, memory, storage and bandwidth on the plan page, and match the numbers to your estimate from Step 1. The specifications on the plan page are the authoritative source, so check them before you buy.

Step 3: Check what you received

After you log in, confirm the operating system and the resources your server really has. Run these commands as your regular user:

cat /etc/os-release
nproc
free -h
df -h /

cat /etc/os-release shows the OS version, nproc prints the number of CPU cores, free -h shows memory in human-readable units, and df -h / shows disk space on the root filesystem. Expected output looks something like this:

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           952Mi       180Mi       510Mi       1.0Mi       262Mi       648Mi
Swap:             0B          0B          0B

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1        19G  2.1G   17G  12% /

Step 4: Watch the server under real load

Once your apps are running, check how hard the server is working. The uptime command prints load averages, which describe how many tasks are waiting for CPU time. A load average close to your core count means the CPU is busy. Press q to quit top, which shows live CPU and memory use by process:

uptime
top

As a rule of thumb, try to keep memory use under about 70 percent and leave headroom for traffic spikes.

Troubleshooting

• The server runs out of memory and services crash. Check for a process using too much memory with ps aux --sort=-%mem | head -n 5. If the load is legitimate, you need a larger plan. Adding swap is a stopgap; see the swap article.
• The disk fills up. Find the largest directories with sudo du -xh / --max-depth=1 | sort -h | tail. Logs and old package files are common culprits.
• The site feels slow but memory looks fine. Look at the load average in uptime. A high load with low memory usually means the CPU is the bottleneck.
• The plan specs on your server do not match the plan page. Contact LightServe support via chat or email with the output of the commands above.

Next steps

With your plan confirmed, connect to the server using the SSH guide, then create a regular user and secure the login. Those steps prepare the server for whatever you plan to run on it.