Mastodawn

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

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pescetarian May 15, 2025

@KuJoe Let's be honest, those who say that they pay $300 for an instance are disingenuous... They want to earn some extra money, probably this is normal, but we all know that the costs are much lower in reality... Or is it not all?!

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Julia Clement May 15, 2025

@pescetarian @KuJoe Yes & no. If you make bad choices or don't carefully monitor what's going on, you can end up paying far too much for hosting.

Recently I was looking at bare metal VPS hosting costs based on some real usage figures for a public Mastodon server. Monthly hosting in New Zealand was reportedly NZD 333 (€175), several times more expensive than the €35.95 monthly hosted in EU by Contabo, my current supplier, or €46.75 with the same company based in Sydney, Australia.

A year or so back I ran a *private* (I was the only user) Friendica instance on my server with between 1 and 5 posts a day and I noticed my bandwidth and database sizes were spiralling up. A bit of investigation showed a lot of traffic coming from apparently misconfigured sites. I ended up discontinuing the instance.

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KuJoe 💞May 15, 2025

@juliaclement location is definitely a huge factor, I know people in NZ and Australia pay way more for bandwidth so hosting is expensive no matter what they do to keep prices down. Luckily most of the bandwidth is used by the media storage so if you can get a cheap enough CDN you can save a lot.

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Julia Clement May 15, 2025

@KuJoe I'm painfully aware of that. My former boss used to describe NZ Internet as being at the wrong end of a damp string which is why I host half a world away from me in Germany.

I was surprised that Australian hosting was roughly 30% (€11) more a month than Germany but as you say, they also have to wear high bandwidth costs.

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Mike [SEC=OFFICIAL]May 16, 2025

@juliaclement @KuJoe just anecdotally, the combined costs of Chinwag and The Blower are much less than that $300 per month figure (assuming USD) and we're going to be able to reduce that further very soon by moving to services that will bill us in local currency instead. Just avoiding the terrible conversion rate alone is worth it.

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Julia Clement May 16, 2025

@mike @KuJoe

No, NZD = New Zealand Dollars. NZD 333 is roughly €175. €35.95 is roughly 20% of that which is why I host my existing (lower specification) websites in Germany. It would take unbelievable fluctuations to overcome that difference.

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Mike [SEC=OFFICIAL]

@juliaclement @KuJoe I was thinking mainly of the $300 figure for the recently closed instance in the OP, guessing it was USD there. I noted in the linked thread that masto.host was their provider and while that can be a good option to get off the ground I don't believe their prices scale very well for instances that grow.

That said, they do take a lot of the admin work off your hands, and I'm taking the exact opposite path and moving to dedicated servers in Australia where I'll need to do a bit more management myself but it's going to make the costs more predictable, as well as lower.