Instance admins, how much does it cost you to run your instance? How much does that represent per active user? - eviltoast

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
  • hitagi@ani.socialEnglish
    15·
    3 months ago

    I managed to bring down ani.social’s monthly costs to only ~14 USD when converted (which includes everything except backups). With 165 monthly users, that comes to around ~0.08 USD with a lot of accomodation.

    Lemmy is efficient in resources except in storage (database and images) which grows infinitely. Unless you’re purging older posts and images, it keeps growing (very slowly).

      • hitagi@ani.socialEnglish
        7·
        3 months ago

        Right now: 0.3GB per user per month. This number is probably much higher for other instances because I don’t keep copies of federated images anymore and I’ve been compressing images early on.

        This doesn’t include bandwidth and backups.

        • matcha_addict@lemy.lolEnglish
          5·
          3 months ago

          That’s pretty high… Leads me to consider hosting an instance on local hardware. I know that’s a whole security mess to deal with, but it night be worthwhile since I have lots of spare storage.