From the comments I see, feddit.uk seems to have the lowest unit costs with 11 pennce.
Worth also noting that:
- We are currently only using about 1/4 of the resources, so people could trim the cost further (although being over specced helps a lot when there are spikes in activity and it will mean we don’t have to upgrade any time soon).
- Our hosting costs are more that fully covered by around 20 people donating and that should scale with growth (although possibly not in a truly linear way). We also have a decent “warchest” which should see us through most temporary problems.
One reason we break the finances down is because we are a medium-sized instance and we want to demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to run one supported by donations.
If anyone has any questions they are welcome to message me or they can drop it into the monthly financial report (the new one will be next week).
Reminds me of Mary Poppins
Good question!
Mine’s a small instance and runs on my existing infrastructure, so my only real cost (aside from a crazy amount of unpaid time and stress) is the domain name which is about $20/year.
If I moved it to dedicated infrastructure, I’ve estimated it would cost me about $65/mo for just the backend, UI, and database services (to maintain the same level of performance, anyway. Could probably host it for less and take a performance hit). Object storage for pict-rs would probably be around $10/mo since I force it to use
webpand have a 512 KB limit for user uploads.Those numbers may be a little high, but they’re based on my existing VPS provider which has amazing SLAs and uptime.
Ditto
k8s cluster + nix flakes
Thanks for sharing! What would be the reason to move it to a dedicated infrastructure, you not needing your existing infrastructure?
What would be the reason to move it to a dedicated infrastructure, you not needing your existing infrastructure?
Yeah, that, or if I decide one day I don’t want to deal with my own hardware anymore. I’ve got a hybrid cloud infrastructure currently, and most of the heavy services (DB mostly) run on my own hardware for cost/performance reasons (and I have fiber, so might as well use it lol)
Would you mind sharing your active user count?
its public across the verse at https://fedidb.org
ptz’s for instance (heh) https://fedidb.org/network/instance/dubvee.org
For others, the number is 8 “monthly active users”.
As this instance is partially operating on “free” hardware, it’s unlikely one can host an instance for much cheaper.
For me it’s zero. In addition to reusing existing hardware, I have a subsidized internet connection that I reuse to connect my instance, and even the domain name is free.
Of course I also have fewer users - excluding me, zero.
About 62 USD per month. I post monthly finance updates. All the costs are covered by user donations so far :)
It might be possible to do it cheaper, but I feel I got a good deal for some very high end hardware so this setup should be scalable going forward for a long time.
All the costs are covered by user donations so far :)
Well done!
I think that user donations are easier when an instance has a good focus. There are some other instances I can think of where the donation model has been enough to cover things. In addition to feddit.dk and beehaw, an instance I use most of the time, ani.social, is more than covered by donations last I checked.
It looks like @hitagi@ani.social even took away the donate link in the sidebar.Never mind, I am just blind. I didn’t notice the little Ko-fi badge at the bottom. I was looking for a text link.I made it a small badge so people wouldn’t have to feel obligated to donate. But yes, the entire instance has been community funded already thanks to generous one-time and monthly donations!
This has been our experience at feddit.uk. Well done to everyone over there. 👍
6.84€ per month. And that’s 6.84€ per user. But I also run a dozen of other services on that VPS.
I have my thinkcentre that I use as main PC on at all times, and it’s basically free in the autumn/winter/early spring as its energy consumption serves as a heater. And orherwise I use it. So say 100 nights uh to be generous 1000h a year for what, 30watt so 30kwh at under 0.2€ equals say 6€.
I’m all alone on the server though so it costs 6€ a year per user I guess 😁
Here’s the stats for mastodon.world and Lemmy.world
(And a few other fediverse sites)
https://blog.mastodon.world/blog-post-for-august-2024-and-july
Thanks, I remember seeing it some time ago, but it’s a bit hard to really identify how much the Lemmy instance exactly costs
Is the shutdown about cost per user? why not just limit signups in a case like that? I sorta assumed some instances were personal instances with no real signups and some where more open public. I don’t see why someone can’t run something with the intention of carrying like 10 users max or 100 or 1000 or what not.
I think a lot of people start up a server because at the time it fits with what they want to do. Once you realize this is not a job (correct description) you wanted to take on it becomes much harder to motivate it.
As soon as you run a server for others outside of the immediate friends/family circle it can be really difficult to deal with the expectations of uptime and service. Also, some don’t want to ask for help but also take on all the moderation themselves too.
how much can someone limit the instance? Like can they not allow magazine creation? It would be good for the good folks who run instances to think about scope and set limits. That does mean some large instances will be the backbone but that does not change that small instances will lighten the load and increase robustness.
It’s possible to turn off local community creation, image uploads, etc.
Lemmy.myserv.one doesn’t host any local content but you can easily browse the rest of the fediverse. Having a diversity of server sizes and formats is definitely a benefit of Lemmy that we should be trying to take advantage of.
Mastodon is used by me alone and costs ¥1590/month.
Misskey is free with OCI for less than 5 people.
PieFed is ¥491/month.Lemmy is the biggest server in Japan, but I host it at home because it has about 5 MAUs.
(Unfortunately, it is not popular in Japan.)Media is R2, but it is still within the limits of no billing.
¥1590/month.
Rough $11/month in freedom dollars. That’s not bad!
Still pricey for a solo use. What is your use cases? Lurking or a frequent poster?
Yea that seems pretty high. I have a solo pixelfed server that runs around $5 / month. It doesn’t get a lot of use though
I probably post frequently.
File servers and multiple BOTs are also running.
It may be a little expensive, but it is a typical amount of money for a VPS that runs Mastodon somewhat comfortably in Japan.
SAKURA internet VPS※Sorry, I’m using machine translation.
Your machine translation is working well.
ive purposefully stood up my instance in a production, scalable environment.
i make my costs public on the https://moist.catsweat.com/faq page.
currently running ~1.60/day = 50$/month…
so far about $0.50/per user/month or $1.25/active user/month which should move downward until i hit resource limits and have to scale infrastructure.
For my single user instance, I can be charitable and say that it’s running on hardware that I already had that is running regardless on spare otherwise unused resources with a already registered domain so the only cost is time spent setting it up. Or I could apply all the costs from the server Lemmy, then it would be about $1200 initially plus ~$10/mo per user.
Looking at just the hosting costs is actually a really bad indicator of total costs. The unpaid volunteer time just to run/manage the instance are likely going to be significantly more than the hosting costs if they were compensated even at minimum wage.
Each of the stacks for XXXiver.se and Bestiver.se (Mastodon + Lemmy + Static Site (+ Linkstack/Wiki for XXXiver.se premium)) are shoved into a Hetzner server at ~$13/month, and backed by R2 Object storage.
My current total hosting costs are ~$30/month to host 2xMastodon, 2xLemmy, 2xStatic Site, 1xLinkstack and 1xWiki. This is basically the minimum cost for me to host all of that on their own infra. I have approximately 0 users other than myself yet, so there’s not really a useful cost/user and I can’t really provide info on scaling.
Unlike most others here I’m seeing if I can make hosting into more of a job by selling the full suite of services to communities (e.g. get your own Mastodon + Lemmy + others) or by up-selling to premium accounts. I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money but I’m curious enough to try.
I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money.
Consider yourself lucky if you manage to break even. I am 5 years into this and the Fediverse side of things have been nothing but a money pit. The only thing that is not keeping me completely in the red is the custom Matrix hosting.
I’ve been curious about going alone on the Fedi but I’ve always been concerned about data storage. How much drive space do you think is required? I presume it accumulates over time.
Unlike most others here I’m seeing if I can make hosting into more of a job by selling the full suite of services to communities (e.g. get your own Mastodon + Lemmy + others) or by up-selling to premium accounts. I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money but I’m curious enough to try.
FYI, there is https://communick.com/ which offers exactly that. The admin is @rglullis@communick.news
I pay around 80€ per month for the lemmy.ml server, plus a few euros for image hosting and domain. So that’s around 3 cents per active user.
that’s quite low. There must be a lot of barely active users
2.39K monthly active users
4th most active instance (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/ )
Hosts 10 of the 100 most active communities (https://lemmy.ca/post/26878531 )
Why is it low? Lemmy scales very well and isn’t resource intensive
It’s lower than every other number I’ve seen in this thread by far
Are you sure? Check again. I didn’t scroll too far, but saw $6, $35, $20, $65 and $30. All are lower.
For cost per user, it’s only 3 cents. A few others are around 10 cents per user, and the rest are significantly higher.
The instances with lower total cost also have much lower activity, lemmy.ml has 2.4k active users but still only 80€ per month. Impressive.
I meant the cost per user. You can’t really compare total costs
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You can compare total better than per user at these scales.
Lemmy needs a certain amount of performance to keep up with federation, but once you have all the images and posts and comments you don’t need second versions until you scale to a size that mandates multiple machines. Which I would guess is more in the 6+ digit user range, where you start averaging requests per second not minute.In some sense, every lemmy user is a user of your instance via federation. You need to pay the performance for all 100k of us whether your instance has 10 or 10k of those. Local users are just a bit extra demanding on your hosting resources.
I suspect the bias we see here with larger instances paying a bit more (50-ish instead of 10-ish) is more due to reliability and snappyness than actual performance needs too. You tend to get optional smaller-gains pricier perks you might not go for for a smaller instance.
Looking at the domain name, they’re in Mali. Things must be cheap out there.
They don’t live in Mali, they chose the TLD for its acronym’s meaning
ML became an echo chamber and many have fled.
An echo chamber that if you say something they don’t want to hear, you know, like the truth, you catch a ban.
I’m a truth seeker! And I’ll kiss ANYONE to find the truth! You…your dad…hey, where’s dad at? I’ll even kiss you! Maybe in 20-30 years when you look a bit more like your dad. Where is your dad anyways???
I have heard it is ban heavy, but it is still quite active in the memes and the Linux communities, and I enjoy both.
If you are interested, there is !linux@programming.dev and !opensource@programming.dev for linux and open source communities which are not on .ml nor .world
I get what’s wrong with .ml. Whats wrond with .world?
We have a detailed post on !fedigrow@lemm.ee : https://lemmy.world/post/14728407?scrollToComments=true
Thanks! I like programming.dev and will participate in those more now (however I don’t have a problem with Linux @lemmy.ml. I believe the ban heaviness of lemmy.ml is politically motivated, but that doesn’t effect Linux content much.
Until you mention that you don’t mind select proprietary packages or drivers.
Thank you!
About $50 monthly for server, backups, image hosting, mails etc.
Masto admin here. Small instance. 20ish users. costs me about 1€ per user.
Most of the costs comes from media cache storage, so it would scale nicely if I had more users, but I want to keep it small
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Cost per month or year?
month
Oh man, I feel like eviltoast.org is on the expensive side of things now. There’s less than 20 mau, but I pay close to $400/mo. Not including object storage or hardware running at home.
Realistically this is hosted on hardware I was already renting for other reasons, so actual cost is zero for lemmy itself. I could probably migrate to a small vm for $20/mo and only lose redundancy.
There’s less than 20 mau, but I pay close to $400/mo.
Wait, what?
It’s infra that was already hosting other things. Lemmy got added to it because there were spare resources in the cluster.
