@Sir_Boops @chad Honestly, considering how much resources is required to support such a large community & the fact that #Mastodon is quite resource heavy, it's actually not too bad. #DigitalOcean is already a pretty good provider in terms of pricing for what you're getting (pricing seems to be in line with other providers like #Vultr, #OVH, #Hetzner and #Linode). If #mstdnca moved to a Tier 1 cloud provider like #MSAzure, #AWS, #GoogleCloud or #OracleCloud, it will likely cost way more than what #DigitalOcean has been charging.

I'm not sure if there are much cheaper alternatives that can provide the same level of service. Sure, you can definitely get a bunch of #VPS on the cheap, endless options can be found at #LowEndBox & #LowEndTalk but those #VPS have no guarantees and often are oversold, which could mean performance issues.

Maybe #S3 storage might be cheaper elsewhere like #Wasabi, #BackBlaze & #CloudFlare's new S3-compatible storage as they don't charge on data egress, but not sure how much the savings would be...

Cost & performance is always that eternal struggle.