I want to host my own lemmy instance sometime in the future. I haven’t self hosted anything yet. How easy is it?

  • punctual
    51·
    3 years ago

    Its quite straightforward. First you need a VPS which is like $10 a month, configure an ssh key on there so you can actually get into the server genreating an ssh key using ssh-keygen on linux, then you need to register a domain name from somewhere like godaddy, then create a dns record A to point towards the ip of your VPS server. Then you follow the guidance on the lemmy documentation to configure lemmy on your VPS. https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/install_ansible.html

    Its as simple and as difficult as that. Althought the hard part that all lemmy instances are having is getting users to join their instance. Lemmy is really small right now but its hoped that we can continue to promote it, by donating to the devleopers, advertising in on sites like Reddit, hacker news, your personal blogs etc. But you should promote the site https://join-lemmy.org/ not a single instance like lemmy.ml

    Hope this helped.

    • Tmpod
      2·
      3 years ago

      A $10 VPS is overkill unless you have a lot of users really. A $5 one (1vCPU and 1GB of RAM) should be enough for quite a bit of users. In my case, I use Vultr, I think they are really great, but there are other hosts out there like DO and whatnot that have similar prices.

      Regarding the domain, I’ve heard bad things about godaddy. I’ve been using PorkBun lately and it has been great; support is fast and helpful (had some troubles with payment and they solved it quickly). Again, it isn’t too important, since you can transfer domains to other registrars.

      Everything else is on point 👌
      I believe there’s also a Yunohost thingy for lemmy1, which would make it a 1-click process, essentially. However, that comes with some overhead, dunno how much.

        • pineapple@sopuli.xyzOP
          1·
          3 years ago

          This seems cool. How many users will this be able to support? Maybe I can host a small pleroma instance here instead of lemmy?

        • Tmpod
          1·
          3 years ago

          Not at all. I run lemmy.pt on a $5 Vultr VPS alongside some other small things. The VPS has been sitting at roughly 350/400MiB of RAM, and essentially never above 5% in the CPU. Lemmy uses less than 30MiB, PostgreSQL about 60/70 and pict-rs roughly 60.
          The instance is small, but I don’t believe it will go beyond the system’s resources until it’s actually rather big, at which point it is likely I will have some financial support (many members have already expressed their availability to help out), so upgrading to a $10 plan shouldn’t be hard.

    • pineapple@sopuli.xyzOP
      1·
      3 years ago

      Thank you. This is helpful.

      If the server gets under powered, can I later upgrade to a more powerful server config?

      • down daemon
        1·
        3 years ago

        most cloud services make that pretty easy or automatic, but be aware a sudden influx of users can cause unexpected expenses

    • juh
      1·
      3 years ago

      You forgot to mention that you need a docker environment with ansible installed.

  • Sr Estegosaurio
    2·
    3 years ago

    I do not exactly know how difficult will be it. But I hope not much. I’m going to research a bit and comment if I find, idk, a yunohost app or smth

  • ksynwa
    1·
    3 years ago

    It depends on how much experience you have with the Linux command line, managing a Linux server, and things like docker/ansible.