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.
@Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox yes.
and I don't use Cloudflare because I don't want to support nazis.
@aurynn @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox
You're talking about that time Cloudflare shielded neo-nazi website on the principle that they provide infrastructure and are not censors and therefore are on a moral obligation to not interfere.
Which they later retracted and kicked them out anyway.
Or are you talking about another incident?
@Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox I am talking about the time they had to be pressured hard earlier this year to drop nazis, and kept refusing and kept refusing and kept refusing and are still unhappy that they had to drop the nazis
because they're nazis and want to protect their own
@Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox and also giving them more power over the internet at large if I did so, so, still no.
As far as buying servers, I
- don't have >=$50k laying around to buy kit
- don't have relationships with any DCs to rack said kit
- don't have the time or interest in researching hardware monitoring
- don't have relationships to buy support contracts for said kit
- would lose a lot of flexibility
- have to deal with depreciation
- etc
@aurynn @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox
I think the problems you describe are related to rather big scale servers. People run mastodons on raspberry pies. I don't think what we're talking about here is a $50k problem.
But let me go back to the international traffic. Is using VPN common in NZ? To pretend all traffic is local? How big of a difference in price are we talking about?
@Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox so because Cloud Island is something people rely on, it’s not one server I’d have to buy, it’s multiple, including multiple disk servers to live in geographically disparate DCs to ensure recoverability in the event of catastrophe. I’d have to get support contracts so that I have easy access to spare parts, and multiple servers so that the site isn’t offline for weeks while I wait for parts to arrive and for the DCs smart hands team to install.
It adds up.
@Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox and if I want my service to be reliable, I’m don’t feel that single servers in a single DC can provide it, whereas cloud lets me do a lot of things with a lot more capability than I would be able to otherwise, and I can abstract all of the depreciation and managing spares and maintaining DCs and everything away, and focus on making sure my users can rely on what I’m doing.
It is a tradeoff in cost, though, yeah.
1.3.6.1.4.1.61513
rastilin
Veticia Misumena 🕷️🌺
Richard Bairwell
Aurynn Shaw