What exactly is the cost of self hosting a Lemmy instance? Understandably you would want a powerful server, but that would be just a single one time purchase.

Where does the rest of the cost come in? Does it require more than a 2 gigabit connection and thus require a data centers 10 gigabit connection?

If I could run an instance on 2 gigabits and spending a 1-3 thousand on a server then I’d be interested in giving it a try.

  • falcon15500@lemmy.nine-hells.netEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Depending upon how many users you are looking to host, Lemmy instances are not very taxing. Most instances are on quite modest hardware.

    • binwiederhier@discuss.ntfy.shEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I host an instance for myself. I have subscribed to many communities (10-20), and I run it on a 1 CPU + 1 GB RAM DigitalOcean droplet. However, the Lemmy instance was OOM-killed already once, and I expect that I have to upgrade eventually.

      The droplet costs $6/month.

      • homelabber@lemmy.oneEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        That’s strange, from what I’ve read a VPS like that should be able to handle at least 20 concurrent users.

        Are you running anything else on the VPS?

          • homelabber@lemmy.oneEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Really weird. Might be a bug.

            I can’t find anyone else reporting memory usage problems. Maybe you could ask in the support community and see if anyone else has encountered the same problem.

            Your VPS should be more than enough and you shouldn’t have to spend more money because of a software issue.

        • binwiederhier@discuss.ntfy.shEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          “If you need to use the swap, you’re doing it wrong” – That’s what I learned long ago. And it has held up so far.

          • Dax87@forum.stellarcastle.netEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            Interesting. I’ve never heard that. I use swap all the time and it’s saved me from OOM scenarios. I’m currently limited on RAM so maybe it makes more sense for my situation.

            • vividspecter@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              zram and other compressed swap approaches can help too (with less of a performance hit) although I use real swap as a fallback. Some would recommend using zswap in that case, but I still want compression in ram to be heavily prioritised but YMMV.

            • th3raid0r@tucson.socialEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Right? Like, my “first” machine had 512MB of ram in an era where most people were running 4GB. SWAP made more modern distributions possible for me. I mean, then again, that wasn’t so much a choice than the harsh reality of growing up broke!

              (My ACTUAL first machine was more like 64MB, but I never did much with it)