KuJoe 💞May 15, 2025

If any Mastodon instances are having trouble with their costs growing out of control, ping me and see if I can help lower your bill.

Apparently a recently closed instance was paying $300/month for hosting which is insane to read considering how small of an instance it was. When we had 40k monthly users I was paying about $120/month so an instance with less than 400 total users (not MAU) should be super cheap to run even with a few TB of storage and bandwidth.

It hurts my heart to read instances closing down over costs and finding out they’re paying more than instances 10x their size. 😢

https://newsie.social/@jeff/114513118997692099

Jeff (of the internet) (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image Another Mastodon server gone. Airwaves.Social shut down & off the air for good. Reason: Costs! https://vmst.io/@User47/114508192446827453 Running a Mastodon server isn’t free & it’s often thankless. But it is essential. If you value independent, community-run spaces, now’s the time to chip in to your favorite server/instances Your server admins can’t keep the lights on with vibes alone. Want to Suport Newsie or Journa.host? DO IT! OpenCollective: https://opencollective.com/newsiesocial#category-CONTRIBUTE PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=BCV5VZ5HRMB3U

Newsie
Show threadJoe Steinbring May 15, 2025
@KuJoe I decided a while ago that the most I would pay to host https://toot.works was $20/mo. I kept new registrations open until I reached a point where I felt like it was the maximum number of users the instance could support, and then I closed new registrations. I see pleas for help with $2,000 monthly bills, and I think that would be just terrifying.
Toot Works

Toot Works is for folks who make things. It provides a collaborative opportunity to build lasting relationships within a supportive creator community.

Mastodon hosted on toot.works
Show threadBlain SmithMay 15, 2025
@[email protected] @[email protected] I feel like this is par for the course for the official Mastodon project. Other options like GoToSocial and snac should take MUCH less to operate. Mastodon just feels bloated.
Show threadRaptor May 15, 2025
@blainsmith @joe @KuJoe aside from just not being written in a terribly efficient manner mastodon is written in ruby and ruby is SLOW, about the only language that executes slower is perl
Show threadKuJoe 💞May 15, 2025
@raptor85 @blainsmith @joe thankfully it doesn’t need to be fast since it scales well, just throw more Arm cores at it and your good to go. 🤣
Show threadRaptor May 15, 2025
@KuJoe @blainsmith @joe yeah, or they could have written it in a ...erm..."fast"...language like java (that was actually painful to say) and gotten upwards of a 10x speed increase off of language inefficiencies alone (ruby is actually SHOCKINGLY bad, like it's not a small difference), making some of these massive instances needing beefy servers likely able to run on raspberry pi level hardware. There's a reason mastodon's competitors are WAY cheaper to run.
Show threadBlain SmithMay 15, 2025
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] cough Go cough Rust cough 😏

Caching all media is rather nuts though too. I get the appeal, but the cost seems to outweigh the benefits.
Show threadJoe Steinbring May 15, 2025
@blainsmith @raptor85 @KuJoe The media caching hasn't been a big deal for me. I'm using 1/5 of my allotment for media storage but 3/4 of my allotment for database storage.
Show threadKuJoe 💞
@joe I wish I could reduce my DB size! I would love to use managed PostgreSQL hosting because I dislike DBA work, but managed DB services are too expensive right now if you need a lot of storage.
May 15, 2025 at 11:00pmWeb