Its not a secret that no ads on lemmy, which makes the process more difficult paying for hosting to keep your instance only, so tell me!
How do you fund your lemmy instance? do you sell products through lemmy? Donations? how you convince people to donate to your instance? Do you sell subscriptions? how?
I’m hosting sopuli.xyz on Hetzner’s VPS that is 6 €/month so funding the instance is mere pocket change. No need to mine cryptocurrency on users’ computers yet :D
If you allow me to ask please, what is the size of your instance (user base, and storage)? how many daily active users? what are the maximum concurrent users at the same time? can 6euro vps handle good amount of posts, users and activity? do you suffer problems during the spike?
7 users per day and 20 per month. The hard drive is 40 GB currently.
I remember here being some ~20 concurrent users.
Yes.
No.
The only issue right now with storage, is pictures, which is ran as a different service, which you could run elsewhere. Text data takes up so little space and isn’t going to be an issue… I think the entire english wikipedia text is only 100GB.
Its a good oppurtuntity to ask, what do you recommend for pictures storage? and what is the most compatible solution?
This is kinda a broad question, but If you need to store a ton of pictures, I’d recommend buying a large hard drive, and setting up sshfs between whatever server you are running, and the folder on your local computer with the hard drive setup.
The real solution for picture storage hasn’t been created yet unfortunately. You can see how asinine it is, when you have pictures cross-posted to 7 different websites, while none of them are sharing the hosting costs by using something like torrents.
The problem with pictures is that their size is in-between small things like text, which is fine to replicate, and large things like audio / videos / movies, which absolutely require torrents to share the hosting costs.
So, here is the thing as i understand. for now we only can store the pictures on the same storage of the server correct me if i’m wrong! buckets cannot be used at this moment? like DigitalOcean spaces or Wasabi?
You can use sshfs to store pictures on any machine you want. The
volumes/pictrs
folder is where they’re stored.Does it need additional storage or is a base vps sufficient?
For now I have the base amount of storage and it has been fine.
I also run with the base VPS storage (25GB) and still have 5GB free (have other stuff running on the VPS besides Lemmy, but not very big either). Pict-rs supports object storage, so it would be trivial and pretty cheap to get a lot of good storage. Providers such as DO and Vultr (and the big players too ofc) provide about 250GB for $5/month, but I’ve heard a lot of great things about BackBlaze, which apparently bills $5 per TB… I’ve not tried it, so dunno.
Point being, storage isn’t really an issue :)
If you don’t mind me asking, is it still this cheap?
Also, thanks for running that lemmy instance! I’m able to find the news I’m looking for there rather than reddit 😁