Why needs Wordpress now 30GB?

September 29, 2015 3.8k views
WordPress LAMP Stack
gdoehring
By:
gdoehring

Hello there,

today I wanted to create a new droplet for Wordpress and I noticed that I now need a droplet with a least 30GB of space.

I use these droplets for development and therefore the smallest tier was always enough for me and I must say that I don't really see the necessity for 30GB ssd space.

Is this on purpose and will it eventually change? It is a bit cumbersone to create a linux droplet and then have to install Wordpress manually what works just fine on a 20GB droplet.

Regards,
Georg

1 comment
  • jolivr January 5, 2016

    Thanks for asking this question.. I was wondering this too; especially after looking up that a vanilla WordPress install only took about 20 MB! :)

    +1 to change the message from requiring more disk space to needing more RAM; I would have easily accepted that without any confusion! lol

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1 Answer
ryanpq MOD September 29, 2015

This was changed a couple months ago. WordPress droplets require 1GB of RAM to run properly. On the 512MB droplets the MySQL process had a tendency to run out of memory and crash.

You can still deploy a 512MB WordPress droplet using the user-data script we provide here. You can use this on the create page by first selecting a 512MB Ubuntu 14.04 droplet and then pasting the script into the user-data field.

If you do plan on running WordPress on a 512MB droplet I strongly recommend that you also set up a swap file. This guide will assist you in getting this in place.

How To Add Swap on Ubuntu 14.04
by Justin Ellingwood
Swap space can be used as an "overflow" area for your system when you run out of RAM. The operating system can store data that would normally be kept in RAM on the hard drive in a specially formatted file. In this guide, we'll demonstrate how to create and use one of these files in Ubuntu 14.04.
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  • sugarhill September 29, 2015

    +1 as a current user who has 512mb droplets running wordpress
    wordpress does work smooth on a 512mb droplet if you optimise it properly as ryan recommended. If you want none of these hazzles just go for a 1 GB droplet

  • gdoehring September 30, 2015

    Maybe then it makes more sense to explain that this images is intended for 1GB of RAM instead of 30GB of SSD ;)

    Nevertheless, thank you for the clarification. So I will continue to use the 512MB version and install it manually (or with that script). I need just a basic wordpress installation for theme-development to show to my customers.

    Thanks and regards,
    Georg

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