Question triggered by the other post about instances shutting down due to costs

Summary of the answers:

  • lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
  • a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
  • obviously single user instance have higher costs
  • Admiral PatrickEnglish
    90•3 months ago

    Good question!

    Mine’s a small instance and runs on my existing infrastructure, so my only real cost (aside from a crazy amount of unpaid time and stress) is the domain name which is about $20/year.

    If I moved it to dedicated infrastructure, I’ve estimated it would cost me about $65/mo for just the backend, UI, and database services (to maintain the same level of performance, anyway. Could probably host it for less and take a performance hit). Object storage for pict-rs would probably be around $10/mo since I force it to use webp and have a 512 KB limit for user uploads.

    Those numbers may be a little high, but they’re based on my existing VPS provider which has amazing SLAs and uptime.

    • Blaze (he/him)OPEnglish
      25•3 months ago

      Thanks for sharing! What would be the reason to move it to a dedicated infrastructure, you not needing your existing infrastructure?

      • Admiral PatrickEnglish
        25•3 months ago

        What would be the reason to move it to a dedicated infrastructure, you not needing your existing infrastructure?

        Yeah, that, or if I decide one day I don’t want to deal with my own hardware anymore. I’ve got a hybrid cloud infrastructure currently, and most of the heavy services (DB mostly) run on my own hardware for cost/performance reasons (and I have fiber, so might as well use it lol)