Let’s say I decided that instead of blogging, I wanted to host my own Lemmy instance that contained a maximum of one (1) user– me, but allowing other users to subscribe.
To show what I’m talking about, look at how kaidomac uses Reddit as his own personal microblog, which people subscribe to.
What is the cheapest way to do this?
My mental model of Lemmy is that if I were to do this, the instance would still be caching information from other instances. This would– at least in my mine– add up in costs.
I’m a software engineer, so feel free to use technical jargon.
I’m not sure how much you’re willing to write off as “basically free”, but electricity does add up for running your own server.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=200w*1 year *%240.14%2FkWh
$245/year assuming constant 200W load which is pretty reasonable for a small web server.
The trick is to have the server do other things like print, Plex, Piwigo, Samba, Shinobi, Frigate, Matrix, etc
If you were worried about saving energy, you would be running an XMPP server over Matrix. Matrix has similarly expensive requirements as Lemmy but Prosody or ejabberd can hum in the background.
My Plex/*arr Intel NUC server uses like 50-75W under heavy load and maybe 5W at idle, and I can’t imagine it’s not powerful enough to run a small Lemmy instance, so even this figure seems a little high to me.
Same, but even lower (Beelink N95). My whole stack of two NAS units, mini PC, switch, router, and modem average a load of 50 watts.
Uhh… maybe putting a 9700k in my server wasnt as good of an idea as i thought it to be… it eats 74watts in idle… uhhh…
Yeahhhh…
Obviously it can all depend on your requirements, but this N95 system has been pretty eye opening on how much people are over-speccing their builds for home server use. It has 8Gb of memory in it, but I seldom see it use more than 2. The box is doing DNS, Jellyfin, torrenting, VPN, private git, etc.
It’s not just a small web server. It’s a dedicated server with full root access and 24/7 direct hardware access without any extra costs.
It depends on how powerful of a machine you need. My server only costs about $9.25/mo to run and it is way overpowered for the services I run on it.