What happens when you have your own Mastodon instance (just for you) where over 21,000 people follow you and when you’re following over 4,300 people?

You end up paying ~€50/month for Mastodon hosting 👀

It also opens up interesting questions: what happens when a popular account joins your instance (hint: it will probably cost the instance maintainers quite a bit… I don’t envy the mastodon.nu folks right now).

#fediverse #mastodon

This stuff is never free anywhere but the scale of Big Tech insulates you from it somewhat.

I actually think it’s good to be reminded that our ability to communicate comes with a cost – in terms of resources, environmental impact, etc., not just money.

But, equally, it also makes the case that a system optimised to host hundreds of thousands of people on a single instance is not also somehow magically optimised to host just one person.

The latter is the problem I’m exploring with #SmallWeb.

@aral You can find much better deals by running your own VPS. I have a 3CPU/2.5GB/40GBSSD/6.5TB-bandwidth-er-month VPS running my instance and it costs me US$24 per *year*. See https://lowendbox.com/blog/2-usd-vps-cheap-vps-under-2-month/
2 USD VPS – Cheap VPS Under $2/Month (Updated September 2025)

Are you looking for a VPS under $2 USD per month? If you’re new to LowEndBox – welcome! LowEndBox.com is a blog site made up of a small team of passionate individuals that have a strong love for the web hosting community with a focus on featuring cheap and affordable VPS deals. Our mission is […]

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@bashley @aral wow this is amazing, how is the performance?
@boynux @aral on mine the queues don't grow, response is snappy, load average usually under 0.25, 91MB mem free.