The amount of memory a VPS has can determine how fast the sites that are hosted on it will load. At the same time, you can have a VPS with very low amount of memory, and still run a full site, and have it operate very fast. It all depends on how the server is configured, and how much of the memory is being occupied. In this blog post, I will discuss how to lower the amount of memory that the cPanel control panel will use. Many of the services that are running on the server by default are not needed.

The first thing you can do is move your email hosting to a service such as Google Apps. Doing this will allow you to turn off the spam services, thus, requiring less memory. Below are the steps to shut-off many of these services.

1)  First thing you will need to do is login to WHM, This is on port ‘2086’.
2) Click on ‘Server configuration’
3) Tweak settings
4) Then select “Disable Spamd”

After doing that, you will need to go into the “service manager”, and also disable “spamd”.

There is also another service that runs, assuming that you are going to use the cPanel system to receive mail.. you can also disable this.. its called “Mailman”. To do this, follow the steps below.

1) Server Configuration
2) Tweak Settings
3) Disable Mailman

After you have done the steps above, then you should have reduced your memory usage very much..there is still more you can do, configure Apache to use less memory. Go into the Apache configuration file, and change the following.

- MinSpareServers 2
- MaxSpareServers 5

If these lines are not in your Apache file, simply add them. To edit the Apache file via an SSH console, do the following.

1) Type in ‘vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf’
2) Hold down ‘shift’ and ‘i’ to allow you to edit the file.
3) Once you have added/edited the lines, type in ‘:wq’.

That’s all you should have to do to get your cPanel VPS running much faster then before. I would recommend you to reboot your server after you have done the above to insure that all the changes were applied and to insure that everything is to the state it should be at.