Start your own for you. Open registration while keeping an eye on resources. When you hit hardware limits, close registration. Should be easy enough to manage moderation, and resources wouldn’t cost much more than the initial costs of running it just for yourself.
The number of users is not really what drives costs honestly. Or at least, it’s not like a linear relationship. I think actually having many popular communities might be a bigger issue.
Of course it is. More queries = more resources.
Yes, but honestly unless you’re very big, federation queries are the bulk of the processing and stuff from your own instance doesn’t matter that much. I mean think about it, do you think the 100 active users on your own instance is what costs or the 10000 users posting all over the fediverse is what matters? Obviously the latter. So again, local user count is not that impactful.
On that topic, could limiting the posting of pictures and asking people to use external picture hosts help with that?
Yes, storage costs matters. I think it’s honestly crazy that Lemmy caches images as much as it does. It would be great to be able to just disable it completely, but alas you can’t do that without disabling uploads for your own users either (at least I don’t know how).
Disabling uploads might be an option. You probably just need to announce it to the people beforehand, but I see most of the people using image links from other sites, so that might not be an issue.
It’s a major downside to my own users though. I wish I could disable uploads for everyone else :P
Indeed 😄
6.84€ per month. And that’s 6.84€ per user.
I managed to bring down ani.social’s monthly costs to only ~14 USD when converted (which includes everything except backups). With 165 monthly users, that comes to around ~0.08 USD with a lot of accomodation.
Lemmy is efficient in resources except in storage (database and images) which grows infinitely. Unless you’re purging older posts and images, it keeps growing (very slowly).
Does the image hosting feature use checksums to reduce the amount of duplicate images?
No, I don’t think it removes duplicate images.
sad
How much storage per user per time, would you estimate?
Right now: 0.3GB per user per month. This number is probably much higher for other instances because I don’t keep copies of federated images anymore and I’ve been compressing images early on.
This doesn’t include bandwidth and backups.
That’s pretty high… Leads me to consider hosting an instance on local hardware. I know that’s a whole security mess to deal with, but it night be worthwhile since I have lots of spare storage.
Good question!
Mine’s a small instance and runs on my existing infrastructure, so my only real cost (aside from a crazy amount of 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 $10/mo since I force it to use
webpand have a 512 KB limit for user uploads.Ditto
k8s cluster + nix flakes
Thanks for sharing! What would be the reason to move it to a dedicated infrastructure, you not needing your existing infrastructure?
What would be the reason to move it to a dedicated infrastructure, you not needing your existing infrastructure?
Yeah, that, or if I decide one day I don’t want to deal with my own hardware anymore. I’ve got a hybrid cloud setup currently, but most of the heavy services run on my own hardware for cost/performance reasons (and I have fiber, so might as well use it lol)
Would you mind sharing your active user count?
its public across the verse at https://fedidb.org
ptz’s for instance (heh) https://fedidb.org/network/instance/dubvee.org
For others, the number is 8 “monthly active users”.
As this instance is partially operating on “free” hardware, it’s unlikely one can host an instance for much cheaper.
For me it’s zero. In addition to reusing existing hardware, I have a subsidized internet connection that I reuse to connect my instance, and even the domain name is free.
Of course I also have fewer users - excluding me, zero.
ive purposefully stood up my instance in a production, scalable environment.
i make my costs public on the https://moist.catsweat.com/faq page.
currently running ~1.60/day = 50$/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.
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
We run on the cheapest Hetzner VPS we can, which is about $8 USD/month. Pictrs are on cloudflare R2. Pictrs storage hovers around 14GB and we have yet to get a non-zero invoice.
Our active users are super low (I think). I don’t think the lemmy interface tells you the number of active users for in instance, just for communities, but since it’s a niche instance I can safely say it’s around 10 people.
So that’s a little less than a dollar per month per user. On the existing VPS I think we could safely add a bunch of users without needing to upgrade.
I don’t think the lemmy interface tells you the number of active users for in instance
I think what you see on the main page (at the bottom right, just below the instance description/rules) is the instance’s specific stats.
Oh that’s cool. I was right, only 9 monthly users.
Beehaw’s financial update https://beehaw.org/post/15866385
Thanks! Looks like $183.58/372, so $0.49 per user per month
Lemmy.zip stats can be found here: Lemmy.zip
Our Admin gives us a monthly report. We are at 54$ while visitor count, rewlquest count can be seen at the report.
$54/504, so around $0.11 per user
Yes about 0.10$ per user. But we know only a few pay a bit more. Look at the open collective link on the post
There are additional costs that aren’t factored in (although they’re not specifically lemmy, and I pay for them myself rather than use donations) such as a very cheap vps for our status.lemmy.zip page and i got a 3 year deal for an external email provider for less than some email providers wanted a month.
Our server is the same one feddit.uk use (a hetzner auction server) although lemmy.zips I think was a touch more expensive per month. But it’s got a lot of room for growth.
Also we now host all our backups offside too, which adds a little on top. I’ll probably cover this in the next server update.
Our server is the same one feddit.uk use (a hetzner auction server)
This is the route I’d recommend as you get superb specs for not much more than you’d be paying through the normal hosting, which, itself, is already very reasonable.
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.
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
This instance runs on the cheapest Hetzner VPS, so €4.18 per month plus yearly domain cost. Right now there is only one active user on this instance so the price for an active user is a bit high, but I don’t really care because I would pay for a VPS even when I don’t run a Lemmy instance on it.
@seb@ioc.exchange publishes the costs for ioc.exchange:
Servers are hosted at Linode and hosting costs are around $300/month. Media files are hosted in AWS S3 and the costs are around $50/month. So in total our running costs are about $350/month.
Unfortunately the donations still don’t cover it.
This is your regular reminder that our hosting costs are roughly $350 per month. In the last 30 days you all have contributed $216. Thank you very much for everyone who has contributed - You are awesome!
edit: User numbers from fedidb: 1,737 MAU, 26,315 total.
5 bucks per month per active user sounds excessively expensive, no?
Yeah I think you got the numbers crossed there :D
Shit. I’m gonna turn my alarm off and get some proper sleep the next days…
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.
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 good deal for some very high end hardware so this setup should be scalable going forward for a long time.
This has been our experience at feddit.uk. Well done to everyone over there. 👍
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.
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!
