I’m pretty new to the fediverse, and I find the idea amazing. But one thing concerns me though. How will server owners be able to afford to run servers with massive amounts of data coming through them? Theoretically speaking, if a Reddit migration were to happen how would server upkeep costs look like?
I run a personal instance with only two human users and a couple of accounts each (admin and daily use). I use a DigitalOcean droplet with 2gb of memory and 80Gb of storage. With a dozen or so communities, my disk usage since July 4 is at about 12gb.
My total monthly cost with weekly backups is about $14 USD. If the storage demands keep going up, my cost will increase to about $19/month
I see four options:
- Server owner assumes all costs of the server. Possible if instance is not huge (ideal on a federated environment) or owner has money and will to do it.
- Accept donations from users
- Require paid subscription to access (and thus becoming private otherwise anyone could still access the server from a free instance)
- Run ads on site. Same as 3, users would migrate.
So I only see 1 and 2 possible
My personal (extremely small) instance with only a few users currently costs around $8 / month on a VPS. Still have plenty of headroom for more users as well I believe.
Yeah, I have wondered also… Just like if I wanted Usenet access I would expect to pay for it… There are costs involved, so how much?
That really depends on how many users and communities you have. It can be in single digits for small servers and hundreds (or even thousands) for the bigger ones. And everything in between for medium-size servers.
Also depends greatly on which software you run. I also run Akkoma, which is super lightweight. Calckey also doesn’t require much. Mastodon is heavier and requires much media cache storage. Lemmy uses more images.
Have you ever looked into hosting a Peertube instance? I’m curious about how the costs compare.
Well I (of course) host one, but not open for signups. It will probably need a lot of CPU for transcoding, and a lot of storage! (Bandwidth too but that’s unlimited for my current servers)
Just out of curiosity of running instances that big… How/where can you get unlimited bandwidth? By bandwidth, i assume you refer to “amount of data” transferred. What is the uplink speed.
A lot of services in Europe provide unlimited traffic. That’s why most of torrent seed services are located in Europe.
