Home Assistant VPS requirements: RAM, CPU, disk, and the limits of the cloud

Sizing guide

Our recommendations, derived from the sourced figures below. Not measurements.

Official requirements

What people report in practice

Individual reports, not controlled tests. Versions, hardware and settings differ, so treat these as data points, not guarantees.

• A bare Home Assistant Container (2026.10.2) settled at 309 MiB idle (range 305–310) and peaked at 347 MiB on start-up, with 122 demo entities and eight automations making about 7 state changes a second. The image is 653 MB compressed and 2.36 GB unpacked

  Third-party test site, median of three runs on a 2 vCPU GitHub Actions runner, 21 Oct 2026. Demo entities only, no real devices, dashboard or phone app

  Test site Self Host Bench: Home Assistant Docker Compose, verified file and RAM · checked Oct 27, 2026

• On a Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB), Home Assistant Container idled at 297.9 MiB and its MariaDB recorder at 102 MiB right after onboarding. The images took about 3.4 GB and 489 MB of disk

  Blog tutorial with measured numbers from a clean install, no devices or add-ons

  Blog peppe8o: Install Home Assistant with Docker on Raspberry Pi, real resource usage · checked Oct 27, 2026

• "I run the docker version of HA, that uses 490Mb of RAM. I run a native MariaDB as my recorder database… that seems to use 580Mb of RAM (and 1.5Gb of disk), and a native Mosquitto MQTT broker, using 10Mb RAM."

  r/homeassistant thread, May 2025

  Reddit Reddit r/homeassistant: How much memory for HAOS VM? · checked Oct 27, 2026

• "I run HA as a docker container in vanilla Debian… HA is currently consuming 580Mb of RAM. I have hundreds of entities from various platforms, bunch of automations & scripts." Another reply runs HA in Docker on a 512 MB NanoPi with HomeKit, Zigbee and YoLink devices

  r/homeassistant thread, Jan 2024

  Reddit Reddit r/homeassistant: Raspberry Pi and RAM · checked Oct 27, 2026

• Home Assistant OS VMs report much more: one user saw 6 GB in Proxmox but 3.6 GB inside HA (the rest was cache); others report 2 GB used of 4 GB with a few add-ons, and "less than 2GB" for hundreds of devices and thousands of entities. One moved from HAOS to Docker and went from 4 GB to 600 MB used, running the same add-ons as separate containers

  r/homeassistant thread, Feb 2026. Several replies point out that a hypervisor's RAM figure includes cache, and that memory pressure is the better signal

  Reddit Reddit r/homeassistant: How much ram should HA be using? · checked Oct 27, 2026

• A user running Zigbee2MQTT against a network Zigbee coordinator over WireGuard said the whole Zigbee network went down whenever the VPN dropped. Fixes that helped: a smart plug to power-cycle the coordinator, a daily scheduled coordinator reboot, and a helper that pings it every 10 seconds and restarts Zigbee2MQTT when it comes back. Another user's link cut off about every two days

  Home Assistant community forum, Feb 2025 to Jan 2026

  Forum Home Assistant Community: SMLight SLZB-06 Zigbee coordinator over VPN, stability issues · checked Oct 27, 2026

What drives Home Assistant's RAM use

The recorder database

Home Assistant writes every state change of every entity to its database and keeps 10 days by default (recorder docs). Chatty sensors, power meters and long retention make it grow; on a 25 GB VPS disk that matters. Exclude noisy entities and keep purge_keep_days modest.

Integrations, entities and apps

The core starts small, and memory grows with what you add. Users with hundreds of entities on Docker report about 500–600 MB; Home Assistant OS VMs with several apps report 2–3.6 GB used. The gap is mostly the apps and the OS's supervisor, not Home Assistant itself.

Image size and updates

The container image is about 2.4 GB unpacked and a new one arrives every month, so old images pile up unless you prune them (Self Host Bench). Budget 10 GB or more for images on top of the database.

CPU is light unless you add AI

Automations and dashboards barely use CPU. Local voice (speech-to-text and text-to-speech), camera processing and local language models are the exceptions; a shared-CPU VPS is the wrong place for those, and we haven't benchmarked them.

Gotchas on a VPS

• Radios can't come with you. Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread and Bluetooth need a radio plugged into the machine running Home Assistant (exposing devices). A VPS has no USB port. The workaround is a network coordinator or a small box at home running Zigbee2MQTT and sending MQTT to the VPS, and the forum thread above shows how fragile that link can be.
• Your automations now depend on the internet. The project's own pitch is that Home Assistant "keeps working even when the internet is down" (installation). On a VPS, every local device command goes from your home to the data center and back, so an outage at home, at the provider or in the tunnel stops lights, locks and heating automations. Keep anything safety-related at home.
• Local discovery doesn't cross a VPN. Automatic discovery (mDNS and similar) only sees the network the server sits on, and on a VPS that is the data center's network. Devices at home need a Tailscale subnet router or WireGuard route plus manually entered IPs.
• Container means no apps. Apps (formerly add-ons) are a Home Assistant OS feature. On a normal Ubuntu or Debian VPS you install Container and run Mosquitto, Zigbee2MQTT or Node-RED as your own containers. Supervised installs, which used to give apps on Debian, lost support after 2025.12 (deprecation post).
• Home Assistant OS needs a custom disk image. Home Assistant doesn't document VPS installs. Getting Home Assistant OS onto a VPS means writing its image over the disk from the provider's rescue system, which some providers allow (Hetzner community tutorial), and it needs UEFI boot. We haven't tested it on any provider listed here.
• Don't publish port 8123 bare. The official compose file serves the UI on port 8123 over plain HTTP. On a public VPS, put it behind a reverse proxy with TLS or reach it only over Tailscale or WireGuard, and use a provider firewall to close 8123.

Cheapest plans that fit

Home Assistant Container, cloud integrations only: 1 GB RAM and 1+ vCPU

Threshold: Reported container RAM: 309 MiB idle on a bare install, 490–600 MB on real setups (no official figure for Container) (source). Only plans with at least 1 vCPU are listed.

Home Assistant, official minimum: 2 GB RAM and 2+ vCPU

Threshold: Home Assistant docs: minimum 2 GB RAM and 2 vCPUs (source). Only plans with at least 2 vCPUs are listed.

Home Assistant OS with apps: 4 GB RAM and 2+ vCPU

Threshold: Home Assistant docs' VM example uses 4096 MB and 2 vCPUs; users with several apps report about 2 GB used (source). Only plans with at least 2 vCPUs are listed.

Prices checked Oct 28, 2026 on each provider's official pricing page. EUR prices converted at the ECB rate of Oct 27, 2026 (1 € = $1.115) only for ranking. See all plans on the cheapest 4 GB VPS page.

Related pages

• Pangolin requirements: If Home Assistant stays at home, a small VPS running Pangolin can publish it without opening ports; it uses little bandwidth.
• n8n requirements: n8n can call Home Assistant's API for automations that reach outside the house; both fit on one small VPS.
• Coolify requirements: The official Home Assistant compose file uses host networking; check how your Coolify setup handles that before deploying it there.
• Vaultwarden requirements: Another light, always-on app that shares a small VPS well.
• Uptime Kuma requirements: Home Assistant's Uptime Kuma integration (since 2025.8) turns monitors into entities; run Uptime Kuma on a VPS so it can see when your home connection drops.