I'd see Chinese RAM manufacturers like CXMT filling the void left in the market for consumer-grade RAM modules, I appreciate they face challenges (like lack of access to cutting edge EUV machines), but the RAM just needs to be fast enough and affordable enough for the average user for these companies to make significant inroads into the market that Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix are abandoning to chase the AI server market.
Their scale is simply too small to affect the market outside China, majority of their chips will be eaten up by HBM3 production with yet unknown yield rate.
They are forbidden to buy foreign equipment beyond their current process node, which is already obsolete, die size is 40% bigger than Samsung, not to mention lithography, the big 3 are using EUV while they are stuck with lobotomized DUV.
They can start making some decent money now, but vastly expanding capacity as is means enormous losses if the cycle went downward a few years later, that's how all previous makers went bankrupt.
They can squeeze out a bit more performance if they are ready to go beyond their current node using only domestic equipment and be blacklisted by the US government.
But the cap is there, unless they can make a working EUV machine in 5 years, they are doomed to be a minor player, if the current cycle even lasts that long.
They will grow exponentially and catch the western market unawares in 10-15 years with a sudden flood of cheap, effective chips. Just like everything else China makes. Electric vehicles for example.
likely naive question: why it is a problem? I would be fine if RAM in my PC has 10 times larger physical size if it is overall cheaper.
I guess that larger may have more power draw, but given costs of RAM and electricity and power draw of RAM it sounds unlikely to be a problem.
At a high end it would run into real-estate prices - at some point using half of room for computer stops making economical sense, given costs of rent or buying flat space. But just doubling size of PC does not sound like a bad tradeoff if it would be say 20% cheaper. Or 50% cheaper.
Is it about not fitting existing motherboards?
Is there reason why they cannot just make memories physically larger? It is "only" 40%, not 40000%
> Their scale is simply too small to affect the market outside China, majority of their chips will be eaten up by HBM3 production with yet unknown yield rate.
They don't currently have the tech to compete on HBM3 production, but they can produce DDR5 memory, and they will undoubtedly be scaling up production on this.
Obsolete process node hardly matters when the rest of the market is bottlenecked on production capacity; small overall scale still might. Expanding capacity may or may not make sense; it depends on your prediction of the way the market will go.
> They can squeeze out a bit more performance if they are ready to go beyond their current node using only domestic equipment and be blacklisted by the US government.
Which suits the rest of the world just fine. More for the rest of us, and if the single-digit-percent portion of their market that the US represents wants to lock itself out, no skin off anyone else's nose.
> which is already obsolete, die size is 40% bigger than Samsung, not to mention lithography, the big 3 are using EUV while they are stuck with lobotomized DUV.
And? That's good enough. My daily driver desktop, which I use to do development, plus play a few games (FC5, Dirt Rally, etc) has 16GB DDR3.
For 90% of computers in use today, including laptops, that RAM you call obsolete is fine.
Users aren't going to complain that a document which takes 3s to open now takes 3.5s
What you need as far as RAM goes, to make the computer perform acceptably is capacity. Users get a bigger performance boost by going from 8GB RAM to 16GB Ram and from 16GB Ram to 32 GB RAM than from DDR3 to DDR4 or from DDR4 to DDR5.
>market that Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix are abandoning to chase the AI server market
These three have collectively committed what, approaching $50B towards construction of new facilities and fabs in response to the demand?
The memory industry has traditionally projected demand several years out and proactively scheduled construction and manufacturing to be able to meet the projected demand. The last time they did that, in the crypto boom, the boom quickly turned into a bust and the memory makers got burned with a bad case of oversupply for years. With that context, can you blame them for wanting to go a bit more slowly with this boom?
Sure, the new fabs won't be up and at volume production until late 2027 / early 2028, but committing tens of billions of dollars to new production facilities, including to facilities dedicated to DRAM rather than NAND or HBM, is hardly 'abandoning'. They're pivoting to higher profit margin segments - rational behavior for a for-profit corporation - but thanks to the invisible hand of the (not quite as free as it should be) market, this is, partially, a self-solving issue, as DRAM margins soar while HBM margins compress, and we're already seeing industry response to that dynamic, too: https://www.guru3d.com/story/samsung-reallocates-of-hbm3-cap...
> Sure, the new fabs won't be up and at volume production until late 2027 / early 2028, but committing tens of billions of dollars to new production facilities, including to facilities dedicated to DRAM rather than NAND or HBM, is hardly 'abandoning'.
Look at what happened to Crucial. Why would Micron axe it's whole consumer RAM division if it was just experiencing a temporary drop in DRAM supplies until new fabs were brought online? Samsung and SK Hynix may have changes in priorities in the coming years, and in the case of Samsung I'm sure they'll still make sure to supply sufficient DRAM chips for the devices it manufactures (phones, TVs, etc...) but Micron has made it's current intentions fairly clear. They'll probably work with OEMs, but they're unlikely to return to selling to the general public any time soon.
This is the classic commodities cycle, and it happens everywhere in an economy where aggregate supply is inelastic in the short term but aggregate demand can fluctuate quickly. The reason it’s coming for DRAM first is that memory is the closest part to a pure interchangeable commodity and that recent process nodes have had almost zero improvement to memory density for years now, despite logic density continuing to increase exponentially. That and these companies have been known to fix prices in the past, but in this case the evidence suggests it’s a large aggregate demand shock.
That's probably what is going to happen, it's a strategic opportunity for the Chinese government here, there's a big market demand that can fuel their domestic production capabilities that nobody wants to take.
It would be a strategic opportunity for Intel, if they weren't run by imbeciles. DDR4 doesn't require the latest and greatest nodes. It's boring old technology. Even DDR5 is pretty boring. Intel could clean up fabbing DRAM (like they used to). But alas no. They're part of the semiconductor cartel and uninterested in the supply of DRAM increasing. Prices would drop and the fabs would only make stupid margins instead of disgusting margins.
I truly wish Chinese Ram manufacturers luck to fulfill this market. Seriously, the amount of ram and its downstream effects can be hardly understated imo. it really just starts impacting everything.
They will first fill the local demand for all their electronics manufacturing. Then their massive computer infra and AI. And if any is left, it will be bundled to local PC exporters like Lenovo.
It’s fine if it’s just filling Chinese manufacturing. Low-cost VPS hosts are going to be using brands like Supermicro anyways. It still gets exported.
Except for RAM from YMTC, which the USA gave a near-death sentence to by placing it on the Dept. of Commerce “Entity List” so no USA-associated business can do business with YMTC now.
I am very hopeful of CXMT. But then then it could take a while for them to ramp up production. Maybe by then, the AI bubble would've burst.
One problem with US sanctions is it could hurt US companies too, like in the case of cutting-edge EUV and CXMT. This is when China is actually a hero and not a villain.
We can certainly do with less plastic junk and fast fashion. But on the high end it hard to argue that cheaper Chinese products are ever a bad thing.
If corporations in western (aligned) countries stopped feeding sovereign wealth funds and private equity with profits and actually invested something maybe they could compete with China more closely, even with whatever shenanigans the CPC get up to with state support.
While not a small host, I thought I would mention what I observed with OVH's VPS offering. I was considering their line of VPSes recently because of how generous the cores/ram quantities were given the price. For example, the smallest offering is 4 cores / 8GB at just over $4 a month.
What I found is that it is cheap because the cores, and presumably ram, is old. Like, 2013 era Xeon E3-1275 v3 old. But that's fine! Old hardware like this uses old ram that is less affected by the current shortage. It's good enough for my needs.
Question: how a person can provide VPS host srevices without being a reseller? Did you own the hardware? I am super interested. Hey, I even would pay for a series of articles about this!
Btw, Hetzner seems to have slightly cheaper offer for such small VPSs, and their disk i/o is much better than at OVH. (My own tests; I always compare the storage speed)
I agree, I think the author had some thoughts in their head that they forgot to write down, because it feels like at least a few paragraphs making the connection are missing. Happens to me all the time when I'm writing something too honestly.
For providers like us, we have to lease IPv4. We came long after IPv4 was already depleted. IPv4 prices did go down. Despite that, the $15/year 128MB BuyVM plan is long-gone.
But for a new provider like us, we'd have to spend more than an established player like BuyVM or RackNerd who bought most of their servers pre-AI-boom.
I don't know if you can consider Netcup "small", but their RS 4000 G12 ("root server", basically a VPS with dedicated/guaranteed resources) costs ~€31 for a monthly contract for any location in Europe without VAT included.
It's 12 dedicated cores of a modern EPYC CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe.
I got that offer during their Black Friday sale and pay €25/month (price before VAT), plus the offer I got has a 2TB NVMe instead of the 1TB one.
> 20000 / 8 customers / 40 USD/mo = 62 months just to recoup CPU and RAM let alone other components.
the most important question is the power, such a setup will blow through easily 500W of power. Granted, a datacenter may not pay 33 ct/kWh but even then, 1/3rd of the monthly income will just go towards naked electricity, not including cooling.
I got a netcup 500 gb server 8 gigs ram 4v cpu and everything with my frugal nature with getting a 5 euro voucher and I was following/seeing their advent calendar too which offered 1 month free
so for 3 months, I got 1 month free, another month with the 5 euro voucher and essentially only paid for the last month.
I ended up paying 8$ in total for the 3 months. Although after the 3 months, I have to pay more around ~5-6$ per month but its still a recurring deal so I guess I might as well continue it (given I have setten everything up)
Some of it is definitely lose making as well to lock in. I usually try to see what gets me to buy a deal because i usually don't buy many things especially online and its usually within some deal concept where I feel like "winning" that I do.
But to be honest, I did some napkin math and honestly, at least for my VPS (although Its usually idle but I have hosted many services on it or experimented with it, its honestly pretty fun imo, I definitely feel so much more freedom imo somehow after getting a vps its hard to explain I suppose or maybe not idk)
But my napkin maths suggests that they lose quite a lot of money with atleast my deal in particular so I got better off getting this deal than say if I was netcup myself somehow (because they probably lose net money on my deal if I actually really use my allocated limits I guess) atleast for the 3 months but I feel like netcup's still one of the more cheaper options and I got a recurring discount deal with it too sooo I would still consider them to have only marginal profits over a long term deal as well.
SO I guess overall, this was a really profitable deal for me.
Your deal's pretty cool too, honestly at large scale. I have done scraping of lowendtalk and analyzed and done many decisions and infrastructural decisions and honestly I will say taht for anything somewhat large scale like you mention 32 gb or something, I found hetzner boxes to be the best/most referred to option & OVH kimsufi line is created to be the cheapest dedicated boxes.
But yeah regarding OVH i recommend this website that I found regarding OVH KS line or just in general https://checkservers.ovh
Just checked it right now and I see Xeon E-2274G 4c / 8t 4.4 GHz+ 32 GB DDR4 ECC 2666 MHz 2 x 960 GB NVMe for around 37-38 euros ish
Also Netcup's definitely not small. I looked at anexia group and I wouldn't constitute them as small. For understanding what small means I guess when I mean small, I mean lowendbox single shop providers and others.
Also regarding Netcup, its payment system was really ass from what I felt like. Like It was the first company which made me feel like I wanted to pay it money but I had to make a CCP or some account nad literally had to go through like 3-4 really long things imo which really made me say (wtf) in my head each time and frustrated me only to give me a stripe link in the end.
It had me so pissed that for 2-3 days one idea of simplifying its whole process and other such providers stuck in my head. Its payment / the whole process of I want to pay -> create account -> actually pay had like 5-6 maybe 7 steps or something and I seriously can't tell you how I frustrated I was but the deal was too lucrative lol
I think that poorly optimised software is killing small VPS hosts... We used to have very usable systems with less than 1MB of RAM.
I've personally built a smart watch that connects to the internet, helps me perform organisation duties, all whilst running (micro-)Python, in far less RAM. To do the equivalent on desktop would require some form of sandboxed browser engine, JavaScript and some weird client-server stack.
I recently upgraded my servers with RackNerd from 768MB to 1GB because it was near free to do so, but I didn't need that extra memory. Before anybody claims they don't do anything, these servers deal with thousands of users a day.
I'm cautiously hoping that we start to see a period of optimisation again. There is currently zero incentivize to optimise anything any more, even if it negatively affects the end user.
I'm not sure this holds up when you look at the actual numbers. In 2016, you could get a DDR4-2400 16GB kit for $81 [1], and a comparable G.SKILL Ripjaws V kit was around $52 [2]. Today (January 2026), that same G.SKILL kit costs $105-146 [3], and most 16GB DDR4 kits are running $95-150 [4]. So RAM is actually more expensive now than it was 10 years ago, not cheaper.
The "did we have X 10 years ago" argument also misses a a lot of modern software requirements. Yes, we had mid-range laptops and budget gaming PCs in 2016, but the memory footprint of everyday applications has exploded since then. Electron-based apps (Slack, Teams, VS Code, Discord) routinely consume 500MB-1GB+ each [5], and it's entirely normal to have multiple running simultaneously. A typical "light" workload in 2026 easily uses 2-3x the RAM that a comparable workflow needed in 2016.
So we're getting squeezed from both sides: applications demand more memory whilst memory itself costs more. An 8GB laptop was perfectly serviceable for office work in 2016; in 2026, it's borderline unusable with a few Chrome tabs and Teams open. The same kit that cost $55 in June 2025 now costs $150 [2, again]. That's a 150%+ increase in six months, pushing capable systems out of reach for budget-conscious users precisely when software bloat is making RAM more essential than ever.
I don't think people really understand how big of a wall outside of GPU/TPUs the CPU, ram and even flash market has hit. We're paying as much if not more for the same stuff we were buying 4-5 years ago.
I do think we're more efficient and matrix operations are better (again, GPU/TPUs), but by and large, the computer hardware world has stopped exponential growth.
The period from 1990 to 2005 was amazing. Both in transistor counts and clock speed, it seemed like we were nearly *doubling* performance with every new generation. Memory and disk space had similar gains.
If everyone is being hit by the same cost issues, small VPS hosts just need to charge more to operate the same. Most small VPS hosts are dirt cheap and I don't think many people would be shocked if prices go up in this environment.
Some dirt-cheap VPS maybe too unreliable to run anything serious, that's why they sell that for dirt cheap. And their consumers generally won't complain about sudden server reboots, because that's what expected for the price.
If they increase their prices, then many of their customers maybe better off just use Linode or DigitalOcean etc instead, as these vendors provides better guaranty on stability.
I’m just making a market assumption that DO needs to raise their prices as well. Everyone needs RAM.
Not sure what the lift might be, but in theory everything should be relatively similar in future state, just more expensive. This is basically a form of inflation.
Sure, the market may shrink some but it's also relative to alternatives that are also increasing. There's no advice in the article the market is shrinking or that pricing is causing it to. People leaving the market on this type of cost will likely be people that have VPS's as idle resources, like some forgotten subscription they don't use but never canceled because it's <$10 per year. If that goes up to $20 per year maybe it triggers them to cancel it. It's so low cost I know this is a portion of their profit from customers like this, but it's just a business problem to solve and shouldn't kill any provider on it's own.
The comparison to 2000s telcom market does not seem similar at all to me.
Readit News
They are forbidden to buy foreign equipment beyond their current process node, which is already obsolete, die size is 40% bigger than Samsung, not to mention lithography, the big 3 are using EUV while they are stuck with lobotomized DUV.
They can start making some decent money now, but vastly expanding capacity as is means enormous losses if the cycle went downward a few years later, that's how all previous makers went bankrupt.
They can squeeze out a bit more performance if they are ready to go beyond their current node using only domestic equipment and be blacklisted by the US government.
But the cap is there, unless they can make a working EUV machine in 5 years, they are doomed to be a minor player, if the current cycle even lasts that long.
likely naive question: why it is a problem? I would be fine if RAM in my PC has 10 times larger physical size if it is overall cheaper.
I guess that larger may have more power draw, but given costs of RAM and electricity and power draw of RAM it sounds unlikely to be a problem.
At a high end it would run into real-estate prices - at some point using half of room for computer stops making economical sense, given costs of rent or buying flat space. But just doubling size of PC does not sound like a bad tradeoff if it would be say 20% cheaper. Or 50% cheaper.
Is it about not fitting existing motherboards?
Is there reason why they cannot just make memories physically larger? It is "only" 40%, not 40000%
They don't currently have the tech to compete on HBM3 production, but they can produce DDR5 memory, and they will undoubtedly be scaling up production on this.
Which suits the rest of the world just fine. More for the rest of us, and if the single-digit-percent portion of their market that the US represents wants to lock itself out, no skin off anyone else's nose.
And? That's good enough. My daily driver desktop, which I use to do development, plus play a few games (FC5, Dirt Rally, etc) has 16GB DDR3.
For 90% of computers in use today, including laptops, that RAM you call obsolete is fine.
Users aren't going to complain that a document which takes 3s to open now takes 3.5s
What you need as far as RAM goes, to make the computer perform acceptably is capacity. Users get a bigger performance boost by going from 8GB RAM to 16GB Ram and from 16GB Ram to 32 GB RAM than from DDR3 to DDR4 or from DDR4 to DDR5.
These three have collectively committed what, approaching $50B towards construction of new facilities and fabs in response to the demand?
The memory industry has traditionally projected demand several years out and proactively scheduled construction and manufacturing to be able to meet the projected demand. The last time they did that, in the crypto boom, the boom quickly turned into a bust and the memory makers got burned with a bad case of oversupply for years. With that context, can you blame them for wanting to go a bit more slowly with this boom?
Sure, the new fabs won't be up and at volume production until late 2027 / early 2028, but committing tens of billions of dollars to new production facilities, including to facilities dedicated to DRAM rather than NAND or HBM, is hardly 'abandoning'. They're pivoting to higher profit margin segments - rational behavior for a for-profit corporation - but thanks to the invisible hand of the (not quite as free as it should be) market, this is, partially, a self-solving issue, as DRAM margins soar while HBM margins compress, and we're already seeing industry response to that dynamic, too: https://www.guru3d.com/story/samsung-reallocates-of-hbm3-cap...
Look at what happened to Crucial. Why would Micron axe it's whole consumer RAM division if it was just experiencing a temporary drop in DRAM supplies until new fabs were brought online? Samsung and SK Hynix may have changes in priorities in the coming years, and in the case of Samsung I'm sure they'll still make sure to supply sufficient DRAM chips for the devices it manufactures (phones, TVs, etc...) but Micron has made it's current intentions fairly clear. They'll probably work with OEMs, but they're unlikely to return to selling to the general public any time soon.
Except for RAM from YMTC, which the USA gave a near-death sentence to by placing it on the Dept. of Commerce “Entity List” so no USA-associated business can do business with YMTC now.
One problem with US sanctions is it could hurt US companies too, like in the case of cutting-edge EUV and CXMT. This is when China is actually a hero and not a villain.
If corporations in western (aligned) countries stopped feeding sovereign wealth funds and private equity with profits and actually invested something maybe they could compete with China more closely, even with whatever shenanigans the CPC get up to with state support.
What I found is that it is cheap because the cores, and presumably ram, is old. Like, 2013 era Xeon E3-1275 v3 old. But that's fine! Old hardware like this uses old ram that is less affected by the current shortage. It's good enough for my needs.
Unlike Fourplex.net which uses modern ASRock Ryzen 9000 servers, Qeru.net used older HPE DL360 Gen9 servers.
I gave 3GB of RAM for $3-4/mo then. But these servers weren't very fast. I ended up selling the business, and am happy I did.
It goes on about DSL and dial-up for some reason?
And yes VPS providers are affected by ram shortage. Turns out things that need ram are affected by ram shortages. 5 stars for the insight
IPv4 shortages didn’t kill it, and I don’t think this will either.
But for a new provider like us, we'd have to spend more than an established player like BuyVM or RackNerd who bought most of their servers pre-AI-boom.
It's 12 dedicated cores of a modern EPYC CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe.
I got that offer during their Black Friday sale and pay €25/month (price before VAT), plus the offer I got has a 2TB NVMe instead of the 1TB one.
CPU launch price 11000 USD. RAM will likely be another 10000 USD
20000 / 8 customers / 40 USD/mo = 62 months just to recoup CPU and RAM let alone other components.
Weird, whenever I napkin math offers of any HW for renting, I get that I could buy it myself in 1-2 years of rent. Sometimes faster.
Do they not intend to recoup the costs of HW? :)
the most important question is the power, such a setup will blow through easily 500W of power. Granted, a datacenter may not pay 33 ct/kWh but even then, 1/3rd of the monthly income will just go towards naked electricity, not including cooling.
Electricity costs are ridiculous.
Deleted Comment
so for 3 months, I got 1 month free, another month with the 5 euro voucher and essentially only paid for the last month.
I ended up paying 8$ in total for the 3 months. Although after the 3 months, I have to pay more around ~5-6$ per month but its still a recurring deal so I guess I might as well continue it (given I have setten everything up)
Some of it is definitely lose making as well to lock in. I usually try to see what gets me to buy a deal because i usually don't buy many things especially online and its usually within some deal concept where I feel like "winning" that I do.
But to be honest, I did some napkin math and honestly, at least for my VPS (although Its usually idle but I have hosted many services on it or experimented with it, its honestly pretty fun imo, I definitely feel so much more freedom imo somehow after getting a vps its hard to explain I suppose or maybe not idk)
But my napkin maths suggests that they lose quite a lot of money with atleast my deal in particular so I got better off getting this deal than say if I was netcup myself somehow (because they probably lose net money on my deal if I actually really use my allocated limits I guess) atleast for the 3 months but I feel like netcup's still one of the more cheaper options and I got a recurring discount deal with it too sooo I would still consider them to have only marginal profits over a long term deal as well.
SO I guess overall, this was a really profitable deal for me.
Your deal's pretty cool too, honestly at large scale. I have done scraping of lowendtalk and analyzed and done many decisions and infrastructural decisions and honestly I will say taht for anything somewhat large scale like you mention 32 gb or something, I found hetzner boxes to be the best/most referred to option & OVH kimsufi line is created to be the cheapest dedicated boxes.
But yeah regarding OVH i recommend this website that I found regarding OVH KS line or just in general https://checkservers.ovh
Just checked it right now and I see Xeon E-2274G 4c / 8t 4.4 GHz+ 32 GB DDR4 ECC 2666 MHz 2 x 960 GB NVMe for around 37-38 euros ish
Also Netcup's definitely not small. I looked at anexia group and I wouldn't constitute them as small. For understanding what small means I guess when I mean small, I mean lowendbox single shop providers and others.
Also regarding Netcup, its payment system was really ass from what I felt like. Like It was the first company which made me feel like I wanted to pay it money but I had to make a CCP or some account nad literally had to go through like 3-4 really long things imo which really made me say (wtf) in my head each time and frustrated me only to give me a stripe link in the end.
It had me so pissed that for 2-3 days one idea of simplifying its whole process and other such providers stuck in my head. Its payment / the whole process of I want to pay -> create account -> actually pay had like 5-6 maybe 7 steps or something and I seriously can't tell you how I frustrated I was but the deal was too lucrative lol
I've personally built a smart watch that connects to the internet, helps me perform organisation duties, all whilst running (micro-)Python, in far less RAM. To do the equivalent on desktop would require some form of sandboxed browser engine, JavaScript and some weird client-server stack.
I recently upgraded my servers with RackNerd from 768MB to 1GB because it was near free to do so, but I didn't need that extra memory. Before anybody claims they don't do anything, these servers deal with thousands of users a day.
I'm cautiously hoping that we start to see a period of optimisation again. There is currently zero incentivize to optimise anything any more, even if it negatively affects the end user.
The "did we have X 10 years ago" argument also misses a a lot of modern software requirements. Yes, we had mid-range laptops and budget gaming PCs in 2016, but the memory footprint of everyday applications has exploded since then. Electron-based apps (Slack, Teams, VS Code, Discord) routinely consume 500MB-1GB+ each [5], and it's entirely normal to have multiple running simultaneously. A typical "light" workload in 2026 easily uses 2-3x the RAM that a comparable workflow needed in 2016.
So we're getting squeezed from both sides: applications demand more memory whilst memory itself costs more. An 8GB laptop was perfectly serviceable for office work in 2016; in 2026, it's borderline unusable with a few Chrome tabs and Teams open. The same kit that cost $55 in June 2025 now costs $150 [2, again]. That's a 150%+ increase in six months, pushing capable systems out of reach for budget-conscious users precisely when software bloat is making RAM more essential than ever.
[1] https://gamersnexus.net/industry/3212-ram-price-investigatio... [2] https://gamersnexus.net/news/ram-wtf [3] https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=ddr4+ram+8gb [4] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ [5] https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/
I do think we're more efficient and matrix operations are better (again, GPU/TPUs), but by and large, the computer hardware world has stopped exponential growth.
The period from 1990 to 2005 was amazing. Both in transistor counts and clock speed, it seemed like we were nearly *doubling* performance with every new generation. Memory and disk space had similar gains.
Today, I can buy a "Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4 PC4-28800C18 3600MHz Quad Channel Kit" for £259.99 [2]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150303141114/http://www.overcl... [2] https://www.overclockers.co.uk/corsair-vengeance-lpx-32gb-4x...
Some dirt-cheap VPS maybe too unreliable to run anything serious, that's why they sell that for dirt cheap. And their consumers generally won't complain about sudden server reboots, because that's what expected for the price.
If they increase their prices, then many of their customers maybe better off just use Linode or DigitalOcean etc instead, as these vendors provides better guaranty on stability.
Not sure what the lift might be, but in theory everything should be relatively similar in future state, just more expensive. This is basically a form of inflation.
The comparison to 2000s telcom market does not seem similar at all to me.