[fChk]

Hi @xdude  You're right.  We should always be positive.  However @fChk is also right.  Although @Pacific Spirit has been generous in his VPS contributions during the years, it's always been very VERY erratic, frustrating, confusing and mind bending.  Chopping and changing all of the time.  All you need to do is look through past announcements.  But OK, we must stay positive, so hope @fChk and I will be proven wrong.  But for others looking at this discussion.  Please be advised you will be doing this completely at your own risk. 

Amen to that !..  I genuinely hope he does succeed this time. My previous post was essentially meant to be a heads-up for him personally. One must take seriously any kind of projects he undertakes... Yes!.. even the for non-profit ones!!... It's about one's online reputation at the end of the day!.. Ruining it means you don't have any either ways (ie for profit or non-profit.)

One tough thing is when all VPS are provided by the site owners it would be a little tough to grow on. When you have sponsors everything is not really one place/person. But it's not hard if managed properly. Right now they offer some really good VPS and there is no other better alternatives.

Indeed!.. This is yet another HUGE WEAKNESS in LNB's free VPS hosting plan!.. Making it 'hostage' to 1  VPS provider, ie the site owner. Thus any unexpected event in the owner's plans can make it tank at any moment --And we saw that a lot at P4V from LNB's part as a sponsor!..

LNB ought to look for other VPS sponsors for it to start looking as a real alternative to P4V. One point of failure isn't a good thing in any project!

My idea was to approach the issue with a minimalistic mindset and try to make it appealing to a more niche market rather than something more generally appealing. I would keep the budget low by offering services at the bare minimum of usefulness rather than trying to duplicate large powerful packages. This would also allow me to be more flexible about posting requirements.

As an example of potential packages:
Small linux distro OS (debian min, sliTaz, tinycore, etc)
32mb ram
1 dedicated ip6
5 NAT ip4 ports
3gb disk
1 quality post a month

packages could be stackable for persons wanting a more powerful system. At 1 quality post a week it would become something like:
128mb ram
1 dedicated ip6
10 NAT ip4 ports
10gb disk

or at 4 posts/week something like
512mb ram
1 dedicated ip6
20 NAT ip4 ports
50gb disk

Those package are more suitable for LX D/LXC containers than KVM-VMs.

For KVM-VMs anything below 1GB of RAM isn't worth a shot.

Just be aware that when you have a host with 32GB RAM that doesn't mean that you can only assign 32GB-worth of  RAM between the host and the running VMs. In fact over-committing RAM is the standard practice giving the fact that not all the allocated RAM is needed all the time by all the VMs. The hypervisor is responsible for adjusting the amount of RAM actually assigned to each running VM depending of its need at the moment. For KVM, the memory virtio_balloon driver is the tool used for that.

This is to say that you still can go ahead and assign 4, 2, 1 GB RAM and keep an eye on how the whole thing performs.

Good luck for that project anyway and keep us posted!