1.3.6.1.4.1.61513Dec 2, 2022

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.

Show thread1.3.6.1.4.1.61513Dec 2, 2022

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
Show threadrastilinDec 2, 2022

@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.

Show threadVeticia Misumena 🕷️🌺Dec 2, 2022
@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.
Show threadSam StephensDec 2, 2022

@Veticia @rastilin and what happens when that machine fails? What happens when that fiber connection fails?

@aurynn it's wild the number of people you have in your mentions who've clearly never owned real production systems and engineered for proper availability who feel they need to comment.

@xssfox

Show threadVeticia Misumena 🕷️🌺Dec 2, 2022
@chopsstephens @rastilin @aurynn @xssfox
For redundancy I have every disk in raid 1 (with daily/weekly offsite backup) and it has 2 power supplies connected to a relatively big ups (it can take a few hours). As for internet I only had to deal with outages a few times in the last few years. I probably could get another connection from another provider, but I don't think it would help much. That one time someone cut the fiber, internet was down in entire city, so I guess all of them share a single point of failure anyway.
Show threadnickDec 2, 2022
@Veticia @chopsstephens it’s really frustrating seeing so many people jump in with the snooty “never run large infrastructure, huh?” attitude when that is objectively the opposite of how we should be building instances. The whole point of federation is many small parts of a larger whole so there aren’t huge single points of failure. It’s ok if your instance goes down for a bit, it’ll get caught back up when it comes back online. I think self hosting on used hardware is perfectly fine (it’s what I’m doing), if you do regular backups offsite, because if you’re going to outgrow that hardware you’re probably staring down an issue of maintaining effective moderation anyway. Don’t grow so big that you need big installation methods.
Show threadSam StephensDec 2, 2022

@nick @Veticia

> objectively the opposite of how we should be building instances

Excuse me? Says who? Objective?

Aurynn wants high availability for her instance. Her users are willing to pay for that. I don't see how anyone else gets a say in whether that's the right way to do things or not.

To be clear, I don't have a problem with you all running on big chunks of physical hardware. We all get to choose, that's the joy.

Show threadnick
@chopsstephens @Veticia The fundamental ideal behind federation is to break monolithic platforms into distributed pieces that form a resilient whole. Building fedi infrastructure like you’re bootstrapping the next Google is quite simply starting off on the wrong foot, full stop. It’s admirable that some people are willing to pay for 100% uptime but what does that actually get them? Twitter and Facebook care about uptime because they make money serving their users ads. How much are fedi users actually harmed if there’s downtime on their instance?
Dec 2, 2022 at 10:56pmWeb
Show threadSam StephensDec 2, 2022

@nick @Veticia if you think that's the next Google you've got another thing coming. I'll tell you right now that's a relatively simple cloud infrastructure.

> How much are fedi users actually harmed if there’s downtime on their instance?

Once again: we all get to choose, that's the joy. You don't have to choose that, but if people do, they're not doing you any harm, and you should butt out.

Show threadVeticia Misumena 🕷️🌺Dec 3, 2022

@nick @chopsstephens
As a side note and a kind of an anecdote I was once (about 10 years ago) in a server room where some of the local, genuine facebook servers were collocated. They were just 3 pc boxes in old, mismatched desktop cases which looked like they were taken out from the '90.

Which proves to me, that even if you are a big internet company. you don't always need big, professional-looking datacenters to run some simple tasks.

Those were most likely cache servers. They have since been removed. The google cache servers that are there now look waaaay more serious. Way more blinky lights.