osTicket Server Requirements, and What a Self-Hosted Help Desk Costs per Month

osTicket is the help desk teams pick when a per-agent subscription stops making sense, and its installation page, checked on 1 November 2026, lists the few things a server must provide. This guide reads them, adds the sizing osTicket does not state, and prices three configurations of the osTicket package on MassiveGRID PaaS, built on Virtuozzo Application Platform (formerly Jelastic).

What osTicket requires

The prerequisites are three lines. A web server: Apache, LiteSpeed or IIS with the URL Rewrite module installed and enabled, which osTicket's clean ticket URLs depend on. PHP 8.2 to 8.4, with 8.4 recommended; the page lists no extensions, though in practice osTicket needs the usual mysqli, gd, mbstring, xml and intl set, which the package's PHP node carries. And MySQL 5.5 or better, with a database user holding full privileges on the database; MariaDB works, and the Windows notes point at MySQL 8.0 and MariaDB 10.11 as current choices. No memory figure is given.

The requirements are modest because osTicket is a classic PHP application: a request builds a page from the database and returns it, attachments go to the filesystem or the database by configuration, and the mail fetcher polls IMAP on a cron. Nothing in it is memory-hungry until the ticket table and the attachment store grow.

What actually sizes a help desk

Three things. Agents logged in at once, each refreshing a queue view that queries the ticket table; ten agents are nothing, fifty are a database question. Ticket volume and history, because osTicket searches the full thread table and never deletes by default; a year of a busy desk is hundreds of thousands of thread entries. Attachments, which are the disk line: store them on the filesystem, not in the database, so the database stays small and backups stay fast. The mail fetcher's interval matters too: every minute is fine for a small desk, and a backlog of thousands of unread messages in a shared mailbox is the usual cause of a slow first import.

The three configurations on PaaS and their cost

The osTicket package installs a PHP application server, a MySQL or MariaDB node and osTicket with a certificate. Cloudlets are 128 MiB RAM plus 400 MHz CPU, billed at $0.003372 per cloudlet-hour, $2.46 per cloudlet-month; osTicket is GPL with no per-agent fee.

Compare the Starter row with a per-agent subscription for five agents and the difference is the whole point of self-hosting a help desk, which the Zendesk comparison prices for a growing team. The figures are ceilings for an always-on environment before volume discounts; a help desk is quiet overnight and billed accordingly. The PaaS pricing calculator prices other layouts.

Email, the part that needs setting up

A help desk is only as good as its mail. Inbound: osTicket fetches from IMAP mailboxes you configure per department; use an app password or OAuth where the provider requires it, and set the fetch interval and the delete-after-fetch behaviour deliberately. Outbound: use SMTP with authentication rather than PHP's mail function, which the platform permits through an external SMTP relay, and set SPF and DKIM for the sending domain so replies do not land in spam. Both are settings in the admin panel, and both are the first thing to test on the trial environment.

Keeping it healthy

Enable osTicket's own cron through the platform's scheduler rather than relying on page-load cron, so mail is fetched and SLA timers run when nobody is logged in. Back up the database nightly with the Database Backup/Restore add-on and include the attachment directory in the environment clone before each osTicket upgrade, which the project releases a few times a year. The small-team tools post shows osTicket beside the wiki and project tools a small company usually runs with it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What PHP version does osTicket need?

PHP 8.2 to 8.4, with 8.4 recommended, per osTicket's installation documentation checked on 1 November 2026, on Apache, LiteSpeed or IIS with URL rewriting enabled, with MySQL 5.5 or better. The package on MassiveGRID PaaS installs a current PHP with the extensions osTicket uses and a MariaDB node.

How much server does a help desk need?

osTicket does not publish a figure; a few agents and hundreds of tickets a month run on 512 MiB of PHP and 512 MiB of database, a support team with thousands of tickets a month on 1 GiB each, and a desk with many agents and a public portal on two PHP nodes behind a load balancer. Attachments on the filesystem are the line that grows.

What does self-hosted osTicket cost?

About $19.68 for the Starter configuration, $39.36 for Standard and $68.88 for Production on MassiveGRID PaaS, at $0.003372 per cloudlet-hour before volume discounts, plus attachment storage per gigabyte. There is no per-agent fee.