We're the creators of Lemmy, Ask Us Anything. *Starts Monday, 7 Aug, 1500 CEST*

Dessalines@lemmy.mlmod to Announcements@lemmy.ml – 1373 points –

This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

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I'm on an incredibly small instance that self reports costs at about $18 USD/month, which is above your costs.

Beehaw reports costs at over $500 USD/month.

I would imagine lemmy.world is in the thousands.

I know the idea is that there should be more instances, but we are already beginning to see server costs that are higher than what you think. User numbers seem to be settling down now, but who knows when the next spike will happen.

It depends where and how you are hosting. Hetzner or OVH have small VPS which can host hundreds of active users for those 10 usd. Of course if you host on AWS or Digitalocean its much more expensive. lemmy.ml is bigger than beehaw, and only costs 80 euros per month for a dedicated server. Hosting costs will also go down as the code gets more optimized.

Yep. As ppl have mentioned, while our performance bottleneck is currently the unoptimized postgres operations, we haven't even come close reaching postgres's actual internal limits. So code and DB optimization will be the biggest factor reducing costs.

I'm on an incredibly small instance that self reports costs at about $18 USD/month

If I really wanted to shoestring it, I could definitely get it lower. But I did want some headroom to grow, and to operate semi-professionally. With the recent upgrades we should be good for a while.

(Also if anyone wants to jump to a small instance, thelemmy.club has some room :)

I run an instance on a spare computer that I had lying in my house. If I had to guess, I would say running my instance probably costs less than a dollar per month.