With t3a.nano instance you got 512MB at a very reasonable price per month (around $5 / 4.5€ for an on-demand instance). It should be enough for running a micro wordpress blog with docker, but sometime it is not. A pair of docker containers can eat up all the memory and your little box will be unable to launch docker-compose shutdown commands with out of memory error all way around.
But we are here to solve the issue, and get the best bang for your bucks :)
To solve temporary memory failures, just create a nice swap space:
sudo bash # The following lines as root fallocate -l 1G /jj-swapfile # if fallocate did not exist, use the old one below # dd if=/dev/zero of=/jj-swapfile bs=1024 count=1048576 chmod 600 /jj-swapfile mkswap /jj-swapfile swapon /jj-swapfile
fallocate will create the file but avoid to initialize it, hence it is faster the old style “dd”.
Because using a block storage as swap file can slow down a lot your little box, do some tests before enabling it.
Anyway this trick enable your system to better manage workload spikes
UPDATE July2020: The same trick can be used on Azure VMs, even on the smallest one