Firstly, thanks for running this instance. After reddit harakiri, this is god sent.

I was wondering how resource intensive is it to run this server? I hope the reddit refugees won’t put a big hole in your hosting bill.

Others like me could also host a server, if there is tremendous load on this one.

  • snoweMA
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    2 years ago

    Hey, yeah I actually was going to see if I could post the full setup and cost on this later, but since you’re asking now I’ll just go ahead and post it here!

    The domain - programming.dev - cost $560 or something like that for the first year, then it’s $427 for every year after.

    The lemmy instance is running on a Vultr High Frequency instance at the lowest tier. I thought I could up it if we started getting high traffic, but expect the server to run just fine for quite a number of users. I do think I might have to move postgres off to its own dedicated instance, but haven’t really thought too much about that yet.

    I think bandwidth is actually going to be the biggest issue, because if we federate with other massive instances then even if there is only a small number of users, we’re pulling in all the traffic from the other instances. I can definitely understand only allowing a few instances, but not sure I’m going to restrict that just yet. If people can donate then that shouldn’t be a problem.

    The email is all running through SendGrid. I was going to use Mailgun, but Sendgrid is a bit easier to use and has a lot higher cap, and I expected to get to that in time. Currently SG costs nothing, but I expect it to cost $35 a month after my trial runs out…

    • lowleveldata
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      2 years ago

      programming.dev - cost $560 or something like that for the first year

      Still couldn’t believe that domain name was available lol

      • snoweMA
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        2 years ago

        yeah pretty amazing honestly

    • pwshguy (mdowst)
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      2 years ago

      Wow, I had not heard of Vultr before. Their costs seem much better than what I saw for running in Azure or AWS.

      And like OP said, let me know if I can help in any way. I have years of infrastructure experience.

      • snoweMA
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        2 years ago

        I am very likely to take you up on that haha. I am super used to running in AWS at this point, though I’ve used digital ocean a long time again. Running in docker containers on a single vps is unusual for me by now hahaha.

    • HairHeel
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      2 years ago

      pulling in all the traffic from other instances

      Does that pull all traffic from that instance, or only traffic related to the specific communities from those instances that people have subscribed to?

      Seems like a good opportunity for improvement if it’s the former.

      • snoweMA
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        2 years ago

        it’s very hard for me to tell. the logs are incredibly noisy. I’d hope the latter, but haven’t dug in.