I’m looking to host a lemmy instance for a small subreddit. I I am unsure if the load would be too much for my home network. In the last 30 days we got 1.7k comments, 96 posts, 95k views, with an average unique of 809.
My home internet connection is 100mb/s down, 20mb/s up. I use the network to work from home as well as general internet degeneracy when I’m off the clock. I have two roommates also using the network for personal stuff, but not working from home. Would this put too much load on my home network?
If it does, could anyone recommend a good web host service that is compatible with lemmy?
It would most likley be fine, however IMO hosting a public service on your home network without segregation such as firewall/vlans etc, it can attract people on the internet who will try and break in, you won’t have things like DDOS protection either
You’d be best getting a cheap VPS off somewhere like OVH, Linode, Hetzner etc with a public IP and run your instance there, that way it is entirely seperate but also you have options to upgrade system resources for little up front expense
Again, probably fine but I’d not do it personally
DDoS can always be mitigated with CloudFlare, and VLANs with enterprie gear. There is always cheap deals on markets such as FB Marketplace. Selfhosting public services always brings its risks!
My understanding had been that I’d still be hosting it locally with a VPS but I’m probably misunderstanding that as this the first time I’m looking into this kind of thing. I’ll take a look at those VPS services you mentioned. Thank you.
Additionally, it was my understanding that using cloudflare and nginx proxy would protect me from DDOS. Am I misunderstanding that?
Looking at Hetzner, the max disk space they offer is 300gb. Is this enough for much activity? The usual activity in my sub is photo sharing, so I’m concerned over disk space availability.
Please do add a tag to your post as stated on the sublemmy sidebar! Thank you. :)
My bad, corrected
20mbit/s per second is not so much, but it should work. In general you have to differentiate between three things with Lemmy:
- Users on your own instance directly utilizing the client api (medium bandwidth heavy, medium CPU)
- Users from other instances indirectly accessing communities (low bandwidth, but potentially high CPU)
- Either of the above directly loading images from your instance (potentially very bandwidth heavy)
For 1: you can limit the number of people you allow to sign up on your instance (highly recommended)
For 2: this is depends on the number of subscribers and the number or external servers but overall is relatively efficient as the remote servers take most of the load, but your server will still have a high database load if remote people comment and post a lot.
For 3: Until Lemmy implements a fully image proxy, this will likely be your main problem with only 20mbit/s upload. But you can severely limit the size of images being uploaded and convert them to smaller sized webp images automatically. But if a lot of people try to download simultaneously the same image from your instance, it’s going to be a problem.
