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 webp and 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.
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)
From the comments I see, feddit.uk seems to have the lowest unit costs with 11 pennce.
Reminds me of Mary Poppins
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).
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
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.
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 )
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.
