Looking at just the hosting costs is actually a really bad indicator of total costs. The unpaid volunteer time just to run/manage the instance are likely going to be significantly more than the hosting costs if they were compensated even at minimum wage.
Each of the stacks for XXXiver.se and Bestiver.se (Mastodon + Lemmy + Static Site (+ Linkstack/Wiki for XXXiver.se premium)) are shoved into a Hetzner server at ~$13/month, and backed by R2 Object storage.
My current total hosting costs are ~$30/month to host 2xMastodon, 2xLemmy, 2xStatic Site, 1xLinkstack and 1xWiki. This is basically the minimum cost for me to host all of that on their own infra. I have approximately 0 users other than myself yet, so there’s not really a useful cost/user and I can’t really provide info on scaling.
Unlike most others here I’m seeing if I can make hosting into more of a job by selling the full suite of services to communities (e.g. get your own Mastodon + Lemmy + others) or by up-selling to premium accounts. I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money but I’m curious enough to try.
I’ve been curious about going alone on the Fedi but I’ve always been concerned about data storage. How much drive space do you think is required? I presume it accumulates over time.
Unlike most others here I’m seeing if I can make hosting into more of a job by selling the full suite of services to communities (e.g. get your own Mastodon + Lemmy + others) or by up-selling to premium accounts. I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money but I’m curious enough to try.
FYI, there is https://communick.com/ which offers exactly that. The admin is @rglullis@communick.news
I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money.
Consider yourself lucky if you manage to break even. I am 5 years into this and the Fediverse side of things have been nothing but a money pit. The only thing that is not keeping me completely in the red is the custom Matrix hosting.
Here’s the stats for mastodon.world and Lemmy.world
(And a few other fediverse sites)
https://blog.mastodon.world/blog-post-for-august-2024-and-july
Thanks, I remember seeing it some time ago, but it’s a bit hard to really identify how much the Lemmy instance exactly costs
ive purposefully stood up my instance in a production, scalable environment.
i make my costs public on the https://moist.catsweat.com/faq page.
currently running ~1.60/day = 50$/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.
From the comments I see, feddit.uk seems to have the lowest unit costs with 11 pennce.
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).
Reminds me of Mary Poppins
Is the shutdown about cost per user? why not just limit signups in a case like that? I sorta assumed some instances were personal instances with no real signups and some where more open public. I don’t see why someone can’t run something with the intention of carrying like 10 users max or 100 or 1000 or what not.
I think a lot of people start up a server because at the time it fits with what they want to do. Once you realize this is not a job (correct description) you wanted to take on it becomes much harder to motivate it.
As soon as you run a server for others outside of the immediate friends/family circle it can be really difficult to deal with the expectations of uptime and service. Also, some don’t want to ask for help but also take on all the moderation themselves too.
how much can someone limit the instance? Like can they not allow magazine creation? It would be good for the good folks who run instances to think about scope and set limits. That does mean some large instances will be the backbone but that does not change that small instances will lighten the load and increase robustness.
We run on the cheapest Hetzner VPS we can, which is about $8 USD/month. Pictrs are on cloudflare R2. Pictrs storage hovers around 14GB and we have yet to get a non-zero invoice.
Our active users are super low (I think). I don’t think the lemmy interface tells you the number of active users for in instance, just for communities, but since it’s a niche instance I can safely say it’s around 10 people.
So that’s a little less than a dollar per month per user. On the existing VPS I think we could safely add a bunch of users without needing to upgrade.
I don’t think the lemmy interface tells you the number of active users for in instance
I think what you see on the main page (at the bottom right, just below the instance description/rules) is the instance’s specific stats.
Oh that’s cool. I was right, only 9 monthly users.
About $50 monthly for server, backups, image hosting, mails etc.
@seb@ioc.exchange publishes the costs for ioc.exchange:
Servers are hosted at Linode and hosting costs are around $300/month. Media files are hosted in AWS S3 and the costs are around $50/month. So in total our running costs are about $350/month.
Unfortunately the donations still don’t cover it.
This is your regular reminder that our hosting costs are roughly $350 per month. In the last 30 days you all have contributed $216. Thank you very much for everyone who has contributed - You are awesome!
edit: User numbers from fedidb: 1,737 MAU, 26,315 total.
5 bucks per month per active user sounds excessively expensive, no?
Yeah I think you got the numbers crossed there :D
Shit. I’m gonna turn my alarm off and get some proper sleep the next days…
Lemmy.zip stats can be found here: Lemmy.zip
Our Admin gives us a monthly report. We are at 54$ while visitor count, rewlquest count can be seen at the report.
$54/504, so around $0.11 per user
Yes about 0.10$ per user. But we know only a few pay a bit more. Look at the open collective link on the post
There are additional costs that aren’t factored in (although they’re not specifically lemmy, and I pay for them myself rather than use donations) such as a very cheap vps for our status.lemmy.zip page and i got a 3 year deal for an external email provider for less than some email providers wanted a month.
Our server is the same one feddit.uk use (a hetzner auction server) although lemmy.zips I think was a touch more expensive per month. But it’s got a lot of room for growth.
Also we now host all our backups offside too, which adds a little on top. I’ll probably cover this in the next server update.
Our server is the same one feddit.uk use (a hetzner auction server)
This is the route I’d recommend as you get superb specs for not much more than you’d be paying through the normal hosting, which, itself, is already very reasonable.
About 62 USD per month. I post monthly finance updates. All the costs are covered by user donations so far :)
It might be possible to do it cheaper, but I feel I got good deal for some very high end hardware so this setup should be scalable going forward for a long time.
All the costs are covered by user donations so far :)
Well done!
I think that user donations are easier when an instance has a good focus. There are some other instances I can think of where the donation model has been enough to cover things. In addition to feddit.dk and beehaw, an instance I use most of the time, ani.social, is more than covered by donations last I checked. It looks like @hitagi@ani.social even took away the donate link in the sidebar.
I made it a small badge so people wouldn’t have to feel obligated to donate. But yes, the entire instance has been community funded already thanks to generous one-time and monthly donations!
This has been our experience at feddit.uk. Well done to everyone over there. 👍
Beehaw’s financial update https://beehaw.org/post/15866385
Thanks! Looks like $183.58/372, so $0.49 per user per month
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.
Thank you!
that’s quite low. There must be a lot of barely active users
Why is it low? Lemmy scales very well and isn’t resource intensive
It’s lower than every other number I’ve seen in this thread by far
Looking at the domain name, they’re in Mali. Things must be cheap out there.
They don’t live in Mali, they chose the TLD for its acronym’s meaning
Are you sure? Check again. I didn’t scroll too far, but saw $6, $35, $20, $65 and $30. All are lower.
I meant the cost per user. You can’t really compare total costs
You can compare total better than per user at these scales.
Lemmy needs a certain amount of performance to keep up with federation, but once you have all the images and posts and comments you don’t need second versions until you scale to a size that mandates multiple machines. Which I would guess is more in the 6+ digit user range, where you start averaging requests per second not minute.In some sense, every lemmy user is a user of your instance via federation. You need to pay the performance for all 100k of us whether your instance has 10 or 10k of those. Local users are just a bit extra demanding on your hosting resources.
I suspect the bias we see here with larger instances paying a bit more (50-ish instead of 10-ish) is more due to reliability and snappyness than actual performance needs too. You tend to get optional smaller-gains pricier perks you might not go for for a smaller instance.
For cost per user, it’s only 3 cents. A few others are around 10 cents per user, and the rest are significantly higher.
The instances with lower total cost also have much lower activity, lemmy.ml has 2.4k active users but still only 80€ per month. Impressive.
ML became an echo chamber and many have fled.
An echo chamber that if you say something they don’t want to hear, you know, like the truth, you catch a ban.
I have heard it is ban heavy, but it is still quite active in the memes and the Linux communities, and I enjoy both.
If you are interested, there is !linux@programming.dev and !opensource@programming.dev for linux and open source communities which are not on .ml nor .world
I get what’s wrong with .ml. Whats wrond with .world?
Thanks! I like programming.dev and will participate in those more now (however I don’t have a problem with Linux @lemmy.ml. I believe the ban heaviness of lemmy.ml is politically motivated, but that doesn’t effect Linux content much.
Until you mention that you don’t mind select proprietary packages or drivers.
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 )
6.84€ per month. And that’s 6.84€ per user.
I have my thinkcentre that I use as main PC on at all times, and it’s basically free in the autumn/winter/early spring as its energy consumption serves as a heater. And orherwise I use it. So say 100 nights uh to be generous 1000h a year for what, 30watt so 30kwh at under 0.2€ equals say 6€.
I’m all alone on the server though so it costs 6€ a year per user I guess 😁
This instance runs on the cheapest Hetzner VPS, so €4.18 per month plus yearly domain cost. Right now there is only one active user on this instance so the price for an active user is a bit high, but I don’t really care because I would pay for a VPS even when I don’t run a Lemmy instance on it.
