i must admit, the 256mb did scare me ... i haven’t associated that with computing in a loooog time. i’m sure it’s traffic dependant, but 256 seems like there is little room for anything after the os, so any traffic and csv parsing or image manipulation sounds like eminent disaster.
As an example, APT (Debian package management system) won’t even run on the 64 MB account that is available with VPSLink. That means anything you add to the system beyond that base installation would have to be compiles from source. The list goes on.
As for traffic, a 64 or 128 MB account would have to be a specialized server rather than a general server. In other words, I might be able to run your mail server but probably not mail and web. Or maybe it would just run your DNS. You probably wouldn’t want to run Apache / MySQL on either but if you did then it would have to be highly optimized for that size.
Slicehost doesn’t even have the option for under 256. Rather than having to worry about having enough memory, just do yourself a favor and start out with 256.
The host in a box option apparently can take 8 million hits on 100mb.
This is a useless statistic.
Disclaimer: I am not a Linux guru. I have never messed with the smaller size accounts. I could be wrong. I’m sure there are people who could show you all kinds of things you could do with the smaller boxes. I’m just saying that as a newcomer, you should start with a 256 MB box. People who know what they are doing don’t need this advice. 😉