My VPS bill jumped and OVH isn't the villain — your next gaming PC is
My OVH renewal came in higher this year and my first, ungenerous instinct was the usual one: here we go, another host discovering it can charge more. Then I actually read OVH's pricing notice, and the villain turned out not to be OVH. It's the same thing that's about to make your next gaming PC hurt to build: the world ran out of affordable RAM, because every gram of it is being fed to AI accelerators.
What OVH actually did
In a notice dated 5 March 2026, OVH raised prices across VPS, Bare Metal and Public Cloud, effective 1 April. For the small VPS tiers the jumps are real: VPS-1 went from €4.49 to €6.49, VPS-3 from €13.99 to €19.99, VPS-5 from €36.99 to €54.99 — roughly a 43–49% bump on the little boxes. The IPv4 surcharge nudged up too (it was already a separate line item; it just got a bit dearer, to around €2/month).
What I appreciated is that OVH didn't hide behind vague "market conditions." They said it plainly: the three big memory makers "have redirected a significant portion of their production capacity to meet the massive demand for GPUs," and they expect RAM cost alone to climb 250–300% by the end of 2026 versus September 2025. That's the honest shape of it.
Why RAM, why now
The macro story is brutal and well-documented. TrendForce's revised forecast in February had conventional DRAM contract prices rising 90–95% quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2026 — PC DRAM over 100%. The mechanism is simple and depressing: Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron make far fatter margins on High-Bandwidth Memory for AI GPUs than on the commodity DDR5 that goes in your server, so they've pointed the fabs at HBM. Analysts reckon data centres will swallow something like 70% of 2026's memory output.
And this isn't a one-quarter blip you can wait out. SK Hynix's own leadership has called 2027 the "worst year" and floated the crunch lasting toward 2030. Micron announced it's exiting consumer memory to prioritise AI customers. New fabs don't come online until 2027–2028. When the people who profit from tight supply are the ones telling you it'll stay tight, believe them.
"Just move to Hetzner" — they raised prices too
The reflexive advice is to jump ship. But Hetzner raised prices on 1 April as well, then again on 15 June, with some dedicated-vCPU cloud plans nearly tripling. Because the pressure is upstream — at the DRAM level, hitting everyone — switching provider doesn't dodge it. It just resets your clock to that provider's next increase. There's no clever host that bought RAM before the AI boom.
What I did instead: make the box need less RAM
My blog runs on a modest OVH VPS — 2 vCPU, 4GB, Drupal on Apache and MariaDB under Coolify. The productive response to "RAM got expensive" isn't rage, it's using less of it. A few things that actually move the needle on a small box, in order of payoff:
- Size the InnoDB buffer pool to your data, not to a rule of thumb. The "50–70% of RAM" advice is for a dedicated database server. On a shared 4GB box that's how you get OOM-killed. My Drupal database is small, so
innodb_buffer_pool_sizesits around 512–768M — enough to cache the working set, no more. - Cap PHP-FPM. An uncapped
pm.max_childrenis the classic way a traffic spike turns into an out-of-memory kill. Measure a real worker's memory (Drupal is often 40–80MB each), divide your PHP budget by that, set the ceiling, and don't let Apache queue more concurrency than PHP can serve. - Add zram. Compressed RAM-backed swap gives you real headroom for almost no I/O cost — far better than paging to disk. With zram in play you actually want swappiness high, because "swap" is now cheap compressed memory rather than a slow disk.
- Keep opcache on but bounded (128M is plenty), skip JIT (little upside for Drupal), and turn off any dev modules that snuck into prod.
The RAM price tripling doesn't mean your bill triples. OVH's actual pass-through was 9–11% on new hardware. Don't confuse the chip market with your invoice.
Is it worth prepaying?
OVH let you lock current rates for up to two years if you renewed before 1 April. Given that every credible forecast points the wrong way for buyers through 2027, locking a low rate was a rational hedge — the only real downside is the usual one of prepaying and tying yourself to a provider. I didn't catch the window in time, so I did the other thing: right-sized the box until the higher price stopped mattering. Honestly, that felt better than a discount. A leaner server is a win whether or not RAM ever gets cheap again.