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)

https://cloudisland.nz/@aurynn/109440864686384321

Aurynn Shaw (@[email protected])

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

Cloud Island

@xssfox @aurynn

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 @xssfox @aurynn
$1000/month?! Just buy a physical machine and drop the rest of that money on an unlimited 1Gbps fiber internet and put cloudflare in front of it. Hell, for $1000 you can do that every month and build your own cloud.
@Veticia @rastilin @aurynn I'm signed up to cloudisland specifically because it doesn't use CloudFlare 🙄