Bitcoin Forum

I need a wallet for a service I'm helping to put together. Will a 512mb vps support bitcoind? (with 15 gb's of storage).

You really don't want to run a wallet on a VPS. This introduces the risk of a dishonest operator or their employee just swiping the wallet, and this has happened fairly regularly when people put bitcoin wallets on VPS servers.

That being said if you just want to run bitcoind on a VPS serverto support the network by providing a good and well connected peer a VPS is a good way to go. I use a lite client and have a VPS that pretty much just runs bitcoind to support the network. I'm using a 1GB VPS, but a 512 could probably work if you allow it adequate swap space. The 15gbs of storage though might be an issue, probably before the end of this year.

If you want a wallet for an online service though you need something more secure.

512mb will run just fine. I've tested it myself with: Ubuntu server 12.04 LTS + bitcoind 0.8.2 in vmware. Memory usage sits at 60%.

My experience has been different. On my 768MB openvz VPS bitcoind kept getting killed due to out of memory conditions. So I think you need 1-2GB just to be safe.

If you are worried about your data not being safe you can get a KVM VPS and encrypt the filesystem that holds the wallet and bitcoind.

Even better would be to do something like the bitcoin plugin for woocommerce does:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/bitcoin-payments-for-woocommerce/

In the above case there is no need to have bitcoind running and if the server is hacked you don't loose your coins.

How often does it crash? My 512mb ubuntu VM is stable for at least 12 hours at 65% mem usage. Swap space is barely being used.

LOL

If someone has physical access to your server, you're not safe
If someone has root access to your server, you're not safe
If someone has hypervisor to your server, you're not safe

I could offer you a KVM VPS with 1 GB RAM or 512 MB RAM for $7 (just the storage differs on the plans) - payable in BTC

1 GB RAM & 10 GB HDD = http://dvcticker.appspot.com/mtgox/7usd/btc.png
512 MB RAM & 20 GB HDD = http://dvcticker.appspot.com/mtgox/7usd/btc.png

You could run a encrypted FS or truecrypt and secure off things if you want that additional security.

u need q1gb

I could not compile bitcoind with 256MB but I'm running bitcoind, litecoind + phpbb3 forum with 1GB without issue. Only 44% of memory used.

Using OpenVZ/1GB RAM/60GB HDD for $45 quarterly from BitVPS.

Probably not. I've run it on 1GB RAM and it crashed intermittently (not very often, but it happened) with out of memory errors.

You probably want more disk too, that blockchain won't grow any slower you know.

After some further testing:

512mb RAM is enough if you have swap enabled. On my vmware server, it runs fine with no crashes. However, on openvz servers, it will run out of ram. 1 GB total ram should be enough for openvz systems.

I had swap on my openvz vps. 256mb of vswap + 768mb dedicated RAM. Yet it wasn't enough. But I was using 0.8.2. I hear there are some bug fixes for memory problems in 0.8.3. So maybe less RAM will do for the newer version.