Why Ollama Instead of ChatGPT Plus?
ChatGPT Plus costs €20 per month. Claude Pro €18. GitHub Copilot €10. Together that's €48 monthly for AI tools – and your data ends up with US corporations.
With Ollama on your own VPS you get: Unlimited usage at a fixed price (~€10/mo), full GDPR compliance with German hosting, and the ability to process sensitive data without sending it to OpenAI or Anthropic.
The sweet spot for most use cases: Llama 3.2 8B or Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B. These models are sufficient for 90% of everyday tasks and run smoothly on a 16GB VPS.
Hardware Requirements by Model
RAM requirements directly depend on model size and quantization. Rule of thumb: 1B parameters ≈ 1 GB RAM (at Q4 quantization).
For CPU inference, more cores are better. AVX2 support is mandatory for acceptable performance. GPU is nice-to-have but not necessary for most use cases.
| Model | Parameters | RAM (Q4) | Tokens/Sec (CPU) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phi-3 / TinyLlama | 1-3B | 4-6 GB | ~50-80 |
| Llama 3.2 / Mistral | 7-8B | 8-10 GB | ~20-40 |
| Qwen 2.5 / CodeLlama | 13-14B | 16-18 GB | ~10-20 |
| Llama 3.1 70B | 70B (quantized) | 48+ GB | ~2-5 |
Our Recommendation
For Chat & Assistance with 7-8B models, we recommend IONOS VPS L with 8 GB RAM for about €12/mo or Contabo Cloud VPS S with 8 GB for about €6/mo.
For Coding Assistants or larger models, Contabo Cloud VPS M offers 16 GB RAM for about €10/mo – the best RAM-per-euro ratio on the market.
Pro tip: Use Continue.dev instead of Cline for more stable remote Ollama connections.