About This VPS
Welcome to Puffy, the name of this blog, which is hosted on a VPS that shall be described in this post. Puffy is of course also the name of the mascot, a blowfish, of the absolutely amazing OpenBSD project.
TL;DR
The VPS provider is TierHive, the VPS has 1 vCPU with 512 384 MB of RAM and 6GB of NVME disk space.
This configuration costs about $5.64 $4.56 per year.
The operating system is OpenBSD, because for quite some time, I was curious about httpd(8),
which is one of the main reasons this VPS exists.
(2026-10-20: reduced RAM, see below for details)
Provider
Thanks to this blog post that recently appeared in my RSS feed I learned about TierHive. They provide very cheap VPS hosting, starting with a configuration for $0.10/month and have a decent selection of Linux and BSD images available.
TierHive provide some initial credit, which is enough to provision a VPS and test drive it for a few hours. One seems to be limited to one VPS at a time before adding funds to the account, so I ended up creating and destroying a few, testing different configurations and operation systems.
Specs
I only increased RAM and NVMe sizes, the rest are default values.
| CPU (vCores) | 1 vCPU |
| CPU Priority | Medium Priority |
| RAM | |
| Fast Disk (NVMe) | 6 GB |
| IOPS Tier | Medium Performance |
| Network Tier | Medium Performance |
| Slow Disk (HDD) | None |
Approximating minimum storage and memory requirements for an OpenBSD VPS
If one sticks to the defaults for NVME and selects the provided OpenBSD image,
there will only be a few MB of free space, not enough for syspatch, so upgrading the system failed.
Obviously installing packages is close to impossible too with this setup.
Unfortunately, if one chooses additional NVME storage space, it will not be available
by default for / or /usr or any other partition, but just be unused / unallocated space, so one
would have to expand the existing partitions. This was not the case when I tested
with Alpine Linux, where each additional GB of NVME space selected would increase
the space of the root partition by the chosen amount.
It might have been user error on my part … Still, I didn't want to mess with expanding partitions, so I went through some trial and error and then decided to not use the TierHive provided image and do a manual installation of OpenBSD instead.
The best option would probably be not to use the autolayout in the installer in order to give /usr
a little more space (I don't need 1.7G for /home), but I was lazy and in general like sticking
to defaults.
_____ ax@ax-vps-openbsd
\- -/ -----------------
\_/ \ OS: OpenBSD 7.9 amd64
| O O | Host: Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996) (pc-i440fx-10.0)
|_ < ) 3 ) Kernel: OpenBSD 7.9
/ \ / Uptime: 8 hours, 33 mins
/-_____-\ Packages: 38 (pkg)
Shell: ksh 5.2.14
Terminal: tmux openbsd-7.9
CPU: AMD EPYC 7351P @ 2.40 GHz
GPU: Mesa llvmpipe (LLVM 19.1.7, 256 bits)
Memory: 100.50 MiB / 463.05 MiB (22%)
Swap: 17.28 MiB / 256.00 MiB (7%)
Disk (/): 115.25 MiB / 953.51 MiB (12%) - ffs
Disk (/home): 390.00 KiB / 1.73 GiB (0%) - ffs
Disk (/usr): 2.00 GiB / 2.90 GiB (69%) - ffs
Local IP (vio0): 10.0.99.10/24
Locale: C
The fastfetch output shows how the installer set up the 4 partition (/, /home, /usr and swap) with autolayout selected and how much space is already used on each - I selected all sets to be installed, since - again - I like sticking to defaults.
I am curious if 256MB of RAM might be enough. Probably yes for just serving a simple site with httpd(8) that basically has no visitors besides myself, but it might struggle during system upgrades. I did not verify this claim yet.
Update 2026-09-12:
I deployed an OpenBSD VPS with 256MB RAM (the installer created 256MB SWAP), and while
the installation went fine, on first boot, I noticed in top that the system slowly began running out of memory and swap,
all the while ld was running (likely the "Relinking to create unique kernel…"), until the VPS became completely unresponsive and
had to be force rebooted. It might work with more SWAP, but going forward, I'll just use 512MB as my personal minimum for OpenBSD.
Update 2026-10-20:
I reduced the VPS RAM from 512M to 384M, which is the lowest amount one can set in the TierHive console (for an existing VPS),
and in turn added a 512MB swap file. Thus the monthly cost drops from 47 to 38 cents.
The actual reason though was a lingering curiosity after my previous, failed attempt with the 256MB VPS
and the fact httpd barely needs any resources - the only time this VPS struggles is when using syspatch(8) or sysupgrade(8).
Price
For the Original Setup
1 token equals $1, so the VPS with the specs above will cost me about $0.47 per month or $5.64 per year.
| VPS Resources | 0.000641 tokens/hr |
| Total Hourly Cost | 0.000641 tokens/hr |
| Monthly Estimate | ~0.4678 tokens |
Since Reducing the RAM Size
With only 384MB of RAM, the price is now 0.000526 tokens/hr, which amounts to ~$0.38 per month or ~$4.56 per year.
Operation System
For some time already I wanted to look into httpd(8), so I installed OpenBSD via mounting the install79.iso
instead of using the provided image (disk partitioning reasons, see above), which took quite a while on this
low-powered hardware.
I will share my notes about installation and setup in another post, if only for my future self.
But I am happy to report that setting up httpd(8) itself was quick and painless.