My personal instance has been up two months with 12 GB space used, but only 88 MB of that is my stuff; the rest is just the cache of others' posts. That can be fairly aggressively cleared out, and I think Mastodon lets you configure an automatic purging of this data.
I was very tempted to create and operate an instance for me and my friends, since Digital Ocean have a nice pre-built image that's ready to go, but it never left the "that would be fun, I should read into that" phase. I hope you don't mind but I'm about to fire off a bunch of questions - if you're too busy to answer or just don't feel like answering, I won't feel offended :) How are you finding it, is it just yourself or do you have a few more users? Do you have to deal with abuse/spam much? Also what kind of hardware do you have it on - is it pretty memory/cpu hungry ever or is it quite well-behaved?
Mine's on masto.host, so it's managed; costs me a few bucks a month and I'm happy with it. It's just for me, so all my follows are federated; as such, spam/abuse has been non-existent.
2 cores and 4 GB memory is more than adequate for a <10 users. My instance runs on an old Celeron NUC sitting on the shelf above the litter box and connects to the internet through a cloudflare tunnel. Works great, and is basically free to run.
Ah funny, I didn't think to look if there was tunneling that let me serve local stuff publicly (I have a NUC tucked away somewhere in my flat, I had it serving some stuff thru SSH tunneling to a Digital Ocean droplet until I realised "why am I not just running this on my droplet?")
I do this, with the digital ocean image. It’s been pretty low overhead so far, I wind up paying like $15 a month at most including storage (not hooking up email saves a lot).
I don’t allow people who I don’t know to make accounts so I haven’t had any spam or abuse trouble.
I haven’t had to deal with any downtime or technical issues since I got it running, which is a bit of a disappointment tbh
Akkoma is a very good option if you're concerned about resource usage. I proxy media from other servers and then let it hit a managed CDN (bunny.net in this case). My CDN bill is less than 10 cents per month.
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That's $3/month on S3.
My personal instance has been up two months with 12 GB space used, but only 88 MB of that is my stuff; the rest is just the cache of others' posts. That can be fairly aggressively cleared out, and I think Mastodon lets you configure an automatic purging of this data.
I was very tempted to create and operate an instance for me and my friends, since Digital Ocean have a nice pre-built image that's ready to go, but it never left the "that would be fun, I should read into that" phase. I hope you don't mind but I'm about to fire off a bunch of questions - if you're too busy to answer or just don't feel like answering, I won't feel offended :) How are you finding it, is it just yourself or do you have a few more users? Do you have to deal with abuse/spam much? Also what kind of hardware do you have it on - is it pretty memory/cpu hungry ever or is it quite well-behaved?
Mine's on masto.host, so it's managed; costs me a few bucks a month and I'm happy with it. It's just for me, so all my follows are federated; as such, spam/abuse has been non-existent.
Ah I hadn't heard of masto.host, ok that's another thing to look into. Thanks!
2 cores and 4 GB memory is more than adequate for a <10 users. My instance runs on an old Celeron NUC sitting on the shelf above the litter box and connects to the internet through a cloudflare tunnel. Works great, and is basically free to run.
Ah funny, I didn't think to look if there was tunneling that let me serve local stuff publicly (I have a NUC tucked away somewhere in my flat, I had it serving some stuff thru SSH tunneling to a Digital Ocean droplet until I realised "why am I not just running this on my droplet?")
I do this, with the digital ocean image. It’s been pretty low overhead so far, I wind up paying like $15 a month at most including storage (not hooking up email saves a lot).
I don’t allow people who I don’t know to make accounts so I haven’t had any spam or abuse trouble.
I haven’t had to deal with any downtime or technical issues since I got it running, which is a bit of a disappointment tbh
Akkoma is a very good option if you're concerned about resource usage. I proxy media from other servers and then let it hit a managed CDN (bunny.net in this case). My CDN bill is less than 10 cents per month.