Mastodawn

Thank you to everyone who has donated over the years to help me cover the costs of genomic.social. The community that has been built here is still going strong thanks to all of you.

Currently, it costs ~$274USD/month for the hosting. Donations have covered around 1/3rd of this cost, and I have been covering the rest which unfortunately can't continue. I am currently ~$2,200USD (~3,076AUD) in the red.

Options I am considering below ->

I have no strong preference between these options:

1. increased donations
2. wind down/close the instance
3. transfer ownership to someone else/a community
4. find a cheaper hosting option than masto.host

I am not quite sure what to do at this point, so I welcome feedback and ideas.

Moreno Colaiacovo 🌍

@Psy_Fer_ I don't know the hardware details of your instance, but have you considered renting a VPS and an object storage? I use Contabo for my tiny instance, but other providers exist. You could check one of their offers and see how much would it cost to replicate what you have now with masto.host

@emmecola my only concern is the increase in maintenance work I would then need to do. Also this instance is a bit above small now, with a few hundred active users. So while definitely an option, it would need to be at least 1/3rd the cost of what I'm paying now.

Moreno Colaiacovo 🌍May 16

@Psy_Fer_ I think it's worth to check the VPS offerings, because I spend roughly 10€/month for 6 CPU cores, 12 GB RAM, 400 GB local disk + 250 GB remote storage. I have ~5 active users, so you clearly need more resources, but I suspect you might spend ~50€/month.

The maintenance is not a big deal for me. After the initial set up, I simply run a system update and a docker compose pull every now and then 🙂

If you are interested, I followed these steps (suggested by @giorgiogilestro ): https://github.com/emmecola/mastodon-sayansi

GitHub - emmecola/mastodon-sayansi: MIRROR OF https://codeberg.org/emmecola/mastodon-sayansi - How to set up a Mastodon instance from scratch

MIRROR OF https://codeberg.org/emmecola/mastodon-sayansi - How to set up a Mastodon instance from scratch - emmecola/mastodon-sayansi

GitHub

Nabil-Fareed Alikhan May 19

@emmecola @Psy_Fer_ @giorgiogilestro on larger instances with more users you have to worry about database size. It is constantly growing.

Moreno Colaiacovo 🌍May 19

@happykhan I see.. I'm curious, how big can the database become in instances like yours? @Psy_Fer_ @giorgiogilestro

Nabil-Fareed Alikhan May 19

@emmecola @Psy_Fer_ @giorgiogilestro

Today the database is 84 gigs.

Nabil-Fareed Alikhan May 19

@emmecola @Psy_Fer_ @giorgiogilestro not sure if masto host handles it, but when running your own server you need a mail service as well. (i use postmark) additional cost,

Moreno Colaiacovo 🌍May 19

@happykhan You're right. I use Brevo, but with my low volumes it's free @Psy_Fer_ @giorgiogilestro

Giorgio Gilestro May 26

@happykhan @emmecola @Psy_Fer_ I do everything on a VPS, including mail. Mastodon is just one of the many services I run. Currently we have 318 active users and I pay 20 euro a month for the VPS (12 cores, 48Gb RAM, 550GB SSD).

@giorgiogilestro What are your backup and downtime strategies with this?

@happykhan @emmecola @giorgiogilestro I wish ours was that small 😅

jonny (nonvenomous)May 17

@Psy_Fer_
@emmecola
Once things are running we have to touch it very little, the maintenance work for us comes mostly from how we run a fork of a fork with customizations, but if we didn't do that then I don't think I'd ever have to touch things. Our costs are roughly $100/month for hosting and it sounds like our instance is roughly the same size.

@jonny @emmecola what are you using for hosting?

jonny (nonvenomous)May 17

@Psy_Fer_
@emmecola
We are using linode, but are looking around for other options ATM because we are reshuffling things generally, wed like to be on flokinet BC they are values aligned but need to price it out and see how hard the move would be

Nabil-Fareed Alikhan May 19

@jonny @Psy_Fer_ @emmecola I am probably going to migrate us off to hetzner at a point.

It should be easy to deploy the postgres and the web application via docker. Shouldn't be too much effort if you are managing yourself, only thing I have to do these days is check storage consumption. VACUUM the postgres. And push mastodon updates. Maybe a couple of hours every 1-2 months.