Is 256MB Ram cloud server enough to run a simple web application in PHP?

I have written a simple web application mostly full of static web pages with several you-tube embeddings. Few forms and so on. All this is developed using CodeIgniter.

The site is very similar to Academic Earth. With开发者_运维问答 videos served from Youtube. It has got 400 users only 30-40 are active.

I am not interested in shared hosting and want a machine with root access. My budget allows me to hire RackSpace cloud server with 256MB Ram.

Is it sufficient to run my application?

Or should this question go on ServerFault.

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Yes, you can run a simple server on 256MB RAM. You would want to look at things like http://www.lighttpd.net/ instead of Apache and do some tweaking to settings (I read that Debian is better at using less RAM out-of-the-box though not sure how true that is.)

Read this: http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/yes-you-can-run-18-static-sites-on-a-64mb-link-1-vps/

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I've had great success running apps on tiny VPS hosts like Slicehost and Linode.

You'll probably be fine with the apache/php/mysql from your distribution's package manager. I've had good results compiling my own AMP stack from source and tweaking things. With PHP 5.3.3, PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is built in, and provides much better FastCGI support.

Running PHP under FastCGI can be adventageous in low-memory situations, since you can then run apache with the worker MPM, which is much more efficient, memory-wise than running prefork-apache/mod_php

Note that currently, Linode will give you a 512MB server for $20/month. However, my experience has been that Linode has semi-frequent network issues (see http://status.linode.com), but otherwise they've been great.

If all you can afford is $20/month, you probably can't do much better. The other nice thing about these VPS hosts is that if you need to grow later, all it takes is a couple of clicks in a control panel and you can upsize your server.