I’m pretty new to the fediverse, and I find the idea amazing. But one thing concerns me though. How will server owners be able to afford to run servers with massive amounts of data coming through them? Theoretically speaking, if a Reddit migration were to happen how would server upkeep costs look like?
My personal (extremely small) instance with only a few users currently costs around $8 / month on a VPS. Still have plenty of headroom for more users as well I believe.
I see four options:
- Server owner assumes all costs of the server. Possible if instance is not huge (ideal on a federated environment) or owner has money and will to do it.
- Accept donations from users
- Require paid subscription to access (and thus becoming private otherwise anyone could still access the server from a free instance)
- Run ads on site. Same as 3, users would migrate.
So I only see 1 and 2 possible
I run a personal instance with only two human users and a couple of accounts each (admin and daily use). I use a DigitalOcean droplet with 2gb of memory and 80Gb of storage. With a dozen or so communities, my disk usage since July 4 is at about 12gb.
My total monthly cost with weekly backups is about $14 USD. If the storage demands keep going up, my cost will increase to about $19/month
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Ruud who runs lemmy.world and mastodon.world publishes financial information on his blog: https://blog.mastodon.world/april-and-may-2023-financial-update
Wow, such transparency… that’s awesome. I wonder (hope) if there will be a massive spike in donations in June.
/me sets alarm to remind me to donate after work since I keep thinking about it while I’m away.
Ya, no kidding. This piqued my interest, but I did not click expecting to see an actual cost basis! I have been looking at potentially setting up my own node, but at the same time… Perhaps contributing here, financially as well, could be the best option.
Still fun to play around with my own stuff though :) Thanks guys!
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He is a Dutchie, that must be why.
I guess so.
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