Mastodon is used by me alone and costs ¥1590/month.
Misskey is free with OCI for less than 5 people.
PieFed is ¥491/month.Lemmy is the biggest server in Japan, but I host it at home because it has about 5 MAUs.
(Unfortunately, it is not popular in Japan.)Media is R2, but it is still within the limits of no billing.
¥1590/month.
Rough $11/month in freedom dollars. That’s not bad!
Still pricey for a solo use. What is your use cases? Lurking or a frequent poster?
Yea that seems pretty high. I have a solo pixelfed server that runs around $5 / month. It doesn’t get a lot of use though
I probably post frequently.
File servers and multiple BOTs are also running.
It may be a little expensive, but it is a typical amount of money for a VPS that runs Mastodon somewhat comfortably in Japan.
SAKURA internet VPS※Sorry, I’m using machine translation.
Your machine translation is working well.
Good question!
Mine’s a small instance and runs on my existing infrastructure, so my only real cost (aside from a crazy amount of time and stress) is the domain name which is about $20/year.
If I moved it to dedicated infrastructure, I’ve estimated it would cost me about $65/mo for just the backend, UI, and database services. Object storage for pict-rs would probably be around $10/mo since I force it to use
webpand have a 512 KB limit for user uploads.Thanks for sharing! What would be the reason to move it to a dedicated infrastructure, you not needing your existing infrastructure?
What would be the reason to move it to a dedicated infrastructure, you not needing your existing infrastructure?
Yeah, that, or if I decide one day I don’t want to deal with my own hardware anymore. I’ve got a hybrid cloud setup currently, but most of the heavy services run on my own hardware for cost/performance reasons (and I have fiber, so might as well use it lol)
Would you mind sharing your active user count?
its public across the verse at https://fedidb.org
ptz’s for instance (heh) https://fedidb.org/network/instance/dubvee.org
For others, the number is 8 “monthly active users”.
As this instance is partially operating on “free” hardware, it’s unlikely one can host an instance for much cheaper.
For me it’s zero. In addition to reusing existing hardware, I have a subsidized internet connection that I reuse to connect my instance, and even the domain name is free.
Of course I also have fewer users - excluding me, zero.
Ditto
k8s cluster + nix flakes
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.
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
ML became an echo chamber and many have fled.
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
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.
I get what’s wrong with .ml. Whats wrond with .world?
An echo chamber that if you say something they don’t want to hear, you know, like the truth, you catch a ban.
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.
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 )
Thank you!
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The number of users is not really what drives costs honestly. Or at least, it’s not like a linear relationship. I think actually having many popular communities might be a bigger issue.
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Yes, but honestly unless you’re very big, federation queries are the bulk of the processing and stuff from your own instance doesn’t matter that much. I mean think about it, do you think the 100 active users on your own instance is what costs or the 10000 users posting all over the fediverse is what matters? Obviously the latter. So again, local user count is not that impactful.
On that topic, could limiting the posting of pictures and asking people to use external picture hosts help with that?
Yes, storage costs matters. I think it’s honestly crazy that Lemmy caches images as much as it does. It would be great to be able to just disable it completely, but alas you can’t do that without disabling uploads for your own users either (at least I don’t know how).
Disabling uploads might be an option. You probably just need to announce it to the people beforehand, but I see most of the people using image links from other sites, so that might not be an issue.
It’s a major downside to my own users though. I wish I could disable uploads for everyone else :P
Indeed 😄
Beehaw’s financial update https://beehaw.org/post/15866385
Thanks! Looks like $183.58/372, so $0.49 per user per month
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 😁
Interesting pattern emerging, the IT time of the admins is pretty damn priceless, (thank you admins!) but when an instance gets up to scale a lot of them can end up with a hard cost of 10 cents per user per month.
The last stat I remember from Facebook was revenue per user per year was around 4 dollars. At 31b revenue and 2.7b monthly users, Youtubes average profit per user is about $10 per user per year. 100 million people pay for YT premium now.
So if every user paid $1 per month, it might not pay all the costs but the admins could get paid something and the fediverse could scale. The bigger you get though, you get economies of scale from future Fediverse data centers, but also you need really good programmers because its a huge temptation for hackers and propagandists.
I also want to say its a labor of love and a lot of work for mods too who may be non technical but the work and time they put in is important.
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.
Masto admin here. Small instance. 20ish users. costs me about 1€ per user.
Most of the costs comes from media cache storage, so it would scale nicely if I had more users, but I want to keep it small
Cost per month or year?
month
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.
From the comments I see, feddit.uk seems to have the lowest unit costs with 11 pennce.
Reminds me of Mary Poppins
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).
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.
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
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.
About $50 monthly for server, backups, image hosting, mails etc.
