Just curious how much it would cost to run an instance? Maybe with 1,000-10,000 users? Also are there any hosts that ya’ll recommend? I am most familiar with Digital Ocean but DO may not be the best area to host an instance.

Apologizes if this is the wrong community to post this in. I am not sure where to find any info on pricing estimates

  • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    The admin of sopuli.xyz said in his FAQ that donations are unnecessary atm, as his expenses total about 12 euros a month.

    Sopuli has a bit under 2000 accounts, I think, and is running on a Hetzner VPS located in Finland.

    • subtextEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I think it’s also important to think about how this doesn’t account for the admin’s time (I know not the point of the question). Since yes donations aren’t necessary for the server, but I want to support the admins who are putting in the work to improve and move Lemmy forward. That’s why I donated at least.

  • orangesEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    I don’t have an answer but I’m also quite interested to find out what kind of server specs are we talking to get off the ground? Would love to hear from someone that has recently started their own…

      • underiskEnglish
        9·
        1 year ago

        One of the devs comments in that thread specifically notes the price. It’s 60 euros a month for the dedicated server this is running on. https://lemmy.ml/comment/577040

        Server pricing isn’t linear though so smaller instances wouldn’t necessarily be proportionally smaller in price.

      • PechenteEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Yeah I think this is the best „benchmark „ we have. Seeing how active this instance is and hoe it still struggles to keep up despite the specs.

        It seems these specs are barely enough to run an instance the size of lemmy.ml

    • insanelysickEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Interested in knowing this too as I’m tempted to host for myself and close friends

  • cstine@lemmy.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    The biggest cost component is going to be storage, I think.

    Looking at my instance, it looks like with me subscribed to ~30 or so communities (and a solo-user instance) pictrs+postgres usage is growing by about 350mb a day.

    If you had hundreds/thousands of users, I’d expect it to be substantially higher than that, and you’d need to scale to a substantial amount of storage relatively quickly, especially if they’re posting lots of media.