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.

  • binwiederhier@discuss.ntfy.sh
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    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.

      • binwiederhier@discuss.ntfy.sh
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        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.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          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.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            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.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            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)

          • binwiederhier@discuss.ntfy.sh
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            I have a laptop with an NVMe drive, and even using a swap on NVMe is orders of magnitude slower than RAM. Usually as soon as you have to swap, everything grinds to a halt quickly, and more stuff stacks up. You can decide for yourself, if you’d rather die a slow death or a quick death.

            • Dax87@forum.stellarcastle.net
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              Yeah I definitely get that. By default, swap is supposed to be secondary to ram, usually swappiness is configured that way. I was not implying that swap was a replacement for RAM, just that it might save you from OOM situations in exchange for some performance dips.

          • th3raid0r@tucson.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            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)

    • homelabber@lemmy.one
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      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.one
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          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.