Why Did the Redis Official Site Crash? Inside the OOM Incident and Cheap Hosting Secrets

Redis official site redis.io suffered a rare outage, displaying an error that it could not connect to Redis.

Redis::CannotConnectError at / Error connecting to Redis on 127.0.0.1:6379 (Errno::ECONNREFUSED)

The author Antirez promptly fixed the issue and explained that the outage was caused by running the Try Redis demo on the same instance, which failed to properly garbage‑collect session keys, leading to memory accumulation and an OOM crash.

His solution was straightforward: upgrade to a $20/month, 4 GB memory instance and configure the allkeys‑lru policy with a 1 GB memory limit.

We also learned that the Redis website runs on a $5/month, 1 GB DigitalOcean Droplet—the cheapest standard configuration offered by the provider.

Antirez chose this low‑cost setup because the host uses Redis only for persistence and runs a single Ruby application, which is sufficient for its needs.