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 @rastilin @aurynn @xssfox it's still a single machine. Things fail other than disks. If that machine fails, can you quickly fail over to another machine? Aurynn can easily stand up and fail over to replacement instances if the hardware she's on fails.
You're telling Aurynn that her service is over-engineered, without knowing the SLAs Aurynn is trying to work to. And I'll tell you now, they're SLAs that you cannot meet with a single physical machine.
@chopsstephens @rastilin @aurynn @xssfox
Oh, I don't have anything to criticise Audrynn for. Her setup looks pretty nice actually.
But I also don't necessarily see a single machine setup to be inherently worse. Aurynn's setup currently works on 8 machines, each with its own distinct role. That's 8 points of failure. If one of them dies of if connection breaks between them, all of them can stop working (especially if that hits the database one). It's nice if someone's dealing with redundancy for you, but you have to trust them to do it right.
As for my setup, I can just throw those disks to another machine (I still have a few laying around) and it'll most likely keep working without changing anything.
But I have to agree, sometimes it's just better to pay someone else to deal with all of that for you. (Unless when it's too expensive to justify the cost.) But since Aurynn instance is a paid one I guess she can figure something out. She does look like a smart one.
1.3.6.1.4.1.61513
rastilin
Veticia Misumena 🕷️🌺
Sam Stephens