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The biggest cost really isn't hosting, because lemmy can easily be run on a VPS for less than $10/month. The biggest cost is moderator time, and they should be paid for if they're running a good instance.
Right now at least, you can put donation links in your site sidebar, or possibly do funding drives via posts.
I'm hosting sopuli.xyz on Hetzner's VPS that is 6 β¬/month so funding the instance is mere pocket change. No need to mine cryptocurrency on users' computers yet :D
If you allow me to ask please, what is the size of your instance (user base, and storage)? how many daily active users? what are the maximum concurrent users at the same time? can 6euro vps handle good amount of posts, users and activity? do you suffer problems during the spike?
If you allow me to ask please, what is the size of your instance (user base, and storage)?
7 users per day and 20 per month. The hard drive is 40 GB currently.
what are the maximum concurrent users at the same time?
I remember here being some ~20 concurrent users.
can 6euro vps handle good amount of posts, users and activity?
Yes.
do you suffer problems during the spike?
No.
The only issue right now with storage, is pictures, which is ran as a different service, which you could run elsewhere. Text data takes up so little space and isn't going to be an issue... I think the entire english wikipedia text is only 100GB.
Its a good oppurtuntity to ask, what do you recommend for pictures storage? and what is the most compatible solution?
This is kinda a broad question, but If you need to store a ton of pictures, I'd recommend buying a large hard drive, and setting up sshfs between whatever server you are running, and the folder on your local computer with the hard drive setup.
The real solution for picture storage hasn't been created yet unfortunately. You can see how asinine it is, when you have pictures cross-posted to 7 different websites, while none of them are sharing the hosting costs by using something like torrents.
The problem with pictures is that their size is in-between small things like text, which is fine to replicate, and large things like audio / videos / movies, which absolutely require torrents to share the hosting costs.
So, here is the thing as i understand. for now we only can store the pictures on the same storage of the server correct me if i'm wrong! buckets cannot be used at this moment? like DigitalOcean spaces or Wasabi?
You can use sshfs to store pictures on any machine you want. The volumes/pictrs folder is where they're stored.
Does it need additional storage or is a base vps sufficient?
For now I have the base amount of storage and it has been fine.
I also run with the base VPS storage (25GB) and still have 5GB free (have other stuff running on the VPS besides Lemmy, but not very big either). Pict-rs supports object storage, so it would be trivial and pretty cheap to get a lot of good storage. Providers such as DO and Vultr (and the big players too ofc) provide about 250GB for $5/month, but I've heard a lot of great things about BackBlaze, which apparently bills $5 per TB... I've not tried it, so dunno.
Point being, storage isn't really an issue :)
If you donβt mind me asking, is it still this cheap?
Also, thanks for running that lemmy instance! Iβm able to find the news Iβm looking for there rather than reddit π
I just pay for a dedicated server because I like hosting stuff so that's more of a hobby. Hosting lemmy on that server doesn't cost me more.
Is it ok to share with us the size of your instance and your server resources? i'm interested to know what makes you go with dedicated server, i believe your instance is busy?
As I've pointed in other comments threads, I run lemmy.pt on a $5/month Vultr VPS (along with some other small stuff). The instance is pretty small still, and as such resource usage is tiny, however, from what I've gathered before, such a VPS will do for quite a while!
Regarding funding, I just pay for the server myself. I created a liberapay group/team/org because some people suggested it in our Matrix channel, but it is clearly labelled as something for people that reeeally want to help out, since I can cover the current costs with no issues.
I pay for a VPS on Digital Ocean for $5 per month so I don't even notice the cost of running one.
Sounds cool, i don`t know if you have plans for the future, and if there is a possibility that your instance will grow!
I don't really have any plans. Would like to grow the instance to maybe 100 users but I don't know how I'm going to do that.
Are you asking everyone about their lemmy instance? Or asking how lemmy.ml is funded?
Everyone about their lemmy instances! individuals who run lemmy for themselves
I want to know both
Just to give you an idea why i need to know this. I'm very interested in launching lemmy instance i love this software, and of course i have no problem even paying $30 for hosting per month. But i'm looking for the future when my instance is growing and will need more computing power, so at least something small to help me cover the costs of the server.
A a $5/month VPS from DO/Vultr/Linode/etc (1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 20/25GB SSD) should be good for quite a while! I have one from Vultr and I run multiple things in there, including lemmy.pt, and haven't ran into any resource issues. The instance is small, but Lemmy doesn't take up more than 350MB (server, UI, postgres, pict-rs and email relay), and CPU basically never goes beyond 20% (idles at 5/10).
π©πͺ i funt ze instentz on join-lemmy.org π©πͺ
I guess wintermute is paying for the virtual machine.
I finance the vps from my own funds, there are no other plans.
thanks for that btw π₯°
For now, paying for a VPS is relatively affordable. But as was noted elsewhere, moderation is the real cost. Last week's terrible antisemitism and racist trolling and spam is a case in point. It led me to raise sign up effort (registration application etc). That has kind of eliminated local-instance spam by 99% and the random ones are existing users, who we kick out as they post spam stuff. The main problem now is in federating with instances that can be hijacked by such trolls and have their content propagated all over. Nothing we can do about that so far as far as we want to maintain existing federation bonds. The moderation cost is still significant as we have to take them down manually.
In the end, I think this is an ideal set up for our instance. We are not after numbers. In fact, we want to have a small number of users as a sustainable path, and hopefully support other individuals and organizations spin up their instances.
I pay for hosting lemmy.ca myself. i just took it over from the previous admin, since they were unable to.
To clarify that comment - I handed lemmy.ca over to @smorks@lemmy.ca as I no longer have the time to run, maintain, and moderate it. The cost for me was negligible at this point - I had it sitting on a dedicated server that ran several other things.
What traffic did you get there ? Why dedicated, when most use VPS for lemmy ?
I already had the dedicated server, so it was easy enough to just virtualhost it.