Zabbix Hosting on Your Own VPS
Agent-based infrastructure monitoring with no per-host licence and retention you decide.
Size a server for Zabbix
Every stop is a real configuration you can deploy. Priced per 30 days, billed by the hour, exclusive of 18% GST.
What Zabbix is
Zabbix is an enterprise monitoring system. Agents on monitored hosts report metrics to a central server, which stores them, evaluates trigger expressions and raises alerts. It also does agentless checks — SNMP, IPMI, HTTP — for devices that cannot run an agent.
It is heavier than a simple uptime monitor and repays that weight with depth: templates for common systems, dependency-aware triggers that suppress the alert storm when a switch fails, discovery that finds new hosts automatically, and history it will keep for as long as your disk allows.
The database is the sizing consideration. Zabbix writes every collected value, so disk consumption is a function of item count times collection frequency times retention. Housekeeping and trend compression help, but the honest planning question is how many items you will collect, not how many hosts you have.
Why run Zabbix on a VPS
No per-host or per-metric licensing — Zabbix is open source and monitored-host count is your decision.
Retention is a disk decision rather than a plan tier.
Root access for database tuning, which is where Zabbix performance work actually happens.
Private networking, so agents report over an internal address rather than the public internet.
Zabbix features
Agent-based and agentless monitoring
SNMP, IPMI, JMX and HTTP checks
Templates for common operating systems and services
Trigger expressions with dependencies
Automatic host and low-level discovery
Alerting with escalation paths
Dashboards, maps and reports
Recommended server
A starting point for Zabbix, not a hard floor — size it on the sliders.
| Memory | 8 GB for the server and its database at modest scale |
|---|---|
| CPU | 4 vCPU; the database is the busy component |
| Storage | 80 GB and upward — history size is items x frequency x retention |
| Operating system | Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or AlmaLinux 9 |
How deployment works
The Zabbix server, its frontend and a MySQL or PostgreSQL database are installed together, with the web interface behind TLS. Plan the database before the host count: collection frequency and retention drive disk far more than the number of machines. Agents on monitored hosts should reach the server over a private network where possible.
What people run it for
Server estate monitoring
CPU, memory, disk and service checks across many hosts from one server.
Network devices
SNMP polling for switches and routers that cannot run an agent.
Application checks
Custom items for anything a script can measure.
Capacity planning
Long trend retention, which per-metric billing usually discourages.
Zabbix hosting questions
Related applications
Deploy Zabbix on your own server
Root access, your choice of size, and no container between you and the application.