A lot of Mastodon instance admins are either getting their first hosting bill or getting a very increased bill from extreme growth and usage. Some may be experiencing bill shock.
Please make sure your paying/supporting them!
Twitter was free because you were the product. Mastodon doesn't work this way.
Many instances list a patreon or donation links on their about page.
The very wonderful @aurynn wrote about what it takes to host cloudisland.nz which is hosted in New Zealand on Catalyst (and not AWS/Azure/GCP)
Okay, I published a big post on what's gone on with Cloud Island this last month. https://www.patreon.com/posts/cloud-island-75379795
It's interesting to see how people organize things. TBH it looks overengeneered to me as well.
Ok, it's $1000 per month on the cloud. For that money you could go to Servers Australia and get a 48 core machine with 256GB of RAM and 2TB of Nvme storage and with 7TB of free bandwidth thrown in.
This is for a dedicated machine, not a VPS, so each processor would probably outperform a vCPU as well.
I think the cost to performance of cloud systems drops off sharply once you go beyond a small handful of small servers.
@rastilin Sure, it's cheaper.... Until a hard drive fails at 3 am or you unexpectedly need to scale up. And of course once you've scaled up you can't trivially scale back down again because you may be stuck with a minimum lease/commitment.
Not to mention all the administrative overhead of having to run a hypervisor for virtual machines and all that jazz yourself.
There certainly is a point at which dedicated hardware makes sense, but for a professional setup imo it comes much later.
1.3.6.1.4.1.61513
rastilin
lutoma