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 threadstux⚡️May 15, 2025

@KuJoe I run a few instances, two of them host quite some people

The MAU has dropped the past time but the costs do not drop with this, their media is still stored and we do not pay more or less if we're within our 20TB limit a month, above that it's only a euro per TB so that's not the issue

Mastodon is a super great service but also a little expensive in how it works with media for example

Our monthly bills varry from betweek 1K up to 1400-1500 euros sometimes, that is 4-5x my home rent

Show threadKuJoe 💞May 16, 2025

@stux I'm guessing a lot of that cost is because of the location? I can't even comprehend what a deployment like that would look like. I'm trying to imagine what a $500/month deployment would look like. Do you happen to have an infrastructure diagram or anything so I can see what your deployment looks like? I really need to rewrite mine, this one is from 2023 where I had a 12 server deployment and it was costing me roughly $90/month.

https://docs.mindly.social/infrastructure-layout/

Infrastructure Layout - docs.Mindly.Social

This is the current infrastructure layout as of 01/16/2023.

Show threadstux⚡️

@KuJoe Also I guess! I made sure it's all within Europe since im also based there but also legal reasons ofc

In the past years ive changed 2 or 3 times from S3 and server hosting to find the best for the most reasonable prices (you know how this can differ soo much)

Our setup is currently actually very simple, all instances but mstdn run on a single server and mstdn has 1 main db/web and 3 sidekiq servers

All media is remote in S3 since it's currently getting close to 50TB or perhaps more

May 16, 2025 at 1:09amWeb
Show threadstux⚡️May 16, 2025
@KuJoe I was for the fun checking masto.host for example, but their max pack would not be enough for 10 or 20% of our current setup 😆
Show threadKuJoe 💞May 16, 2025

@stux Yikes, that's a lot of storage! Are you doing colocation or renting hardware? 1400/month can buy you a lot of hardware and a 42U cabinet (at least in the US). 😉

I actually have like 6 older Dell R610s filled to the brim with SSDs and RAM that I was going to toss out, but they'd probably make a lovely k8s cluster for future Mastodon instances.

I really wish Mastodon would implement a way to split the media up so you could host cached media in cheaper object storage like S3 and the more important local media on the server's storage for faster performance and resiliency.