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
  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    761·
    13 days ago

    Good question!

    Mine’s a small instance and runs on my existing infrastructure, so my only real cost (aside from a crazy amount of unpaid time and stress) is the domain name which is about $20/year.

    If I moved it to dedicated infrastructure, I’ve estimated it would cost me about $65/mo for just the backend, UI, and database services (to maintain the same level of performance, anyway. Could probably host it for less and take a performance hit). Object storage for pict-rs would probably be around $10/mo since I force it to use webp and have a 512 KB limit for user uploads.

    Those numbers may be a little high, but they’re based on my existing VPS provider which has amazing SLAs and uptime.

    • Blaze@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      18·
      13 days ago

      Thanks for sharing! What would be the reason to move it to a dedicated infrastructure, you not needing your existing infrastructure?

      • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
        191·
        13 days ago

        What would be the reason to move it to a dedicated infrastructure, you not needing your existing infrastructure?

        Yeah, that, or if I decide one day I don’t want to deal with my own hardware anymore. I’ve got a hybrid cloud infrastructure currently, and most of the heavy services (DB mostly) run on my own hardware for cost/performance reasons (and I have fiber, so might as well use it lol)

      • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukEnglish
        6·
        11 days ago

        Worth also noting that:

        • We are currently only using about 1/4 of the resources, so people could trim the cost further (although being over specced helps a lot when there are spikes in activity and it will mean we don’t have to upgrade any time soon).
        • Our hosting costs are more that fully covered by around 20 people donating and that should scale with growth (although possibly not in a truly linear way). We also have a decent “warchest” which should see us through most temporary problems.

        One reason we break the finances down is because we are a medium-sized instance and we want to demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to run one supported by donations.

        If anyone has any questions they are welcome to message me or they can drop it into the monthly financial report (the new one will be next week).

    • Blaze@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      12·
      13 days ago

      Thanks, I remember seeing it some time ago, but it’s a bit hard to really identify how much the Lemmy instance exactly costs

  • nutomic@lemmy.mlEnglish
    393·
    13 days ago

    I pay around 80€ per month for the lemmy.ml server, plus a few euros for image hosting and domain. So that’s around 3 cents per active user.

          • matcha_addict@lemy.lolEnglish
            2·
            13 days ago

            Are you sure? Check again. I didn’t scroll too far, but saw $6, $35, $20, $65 and $30. All are lower.

              • Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                2·
                13 days ago

                You can compare total better than per user at these scales.
                Lemmy needs a certain amount of performance to keep up with federation, but once you have all the images and posts and comments you don’t need second versions until you scale to a size that mandates multiple machines. Which I would guess is more in the 6+ digit user range, where you start averaging requests per second not minute.

                In some sense, every lemmy user is a user of your instance via federation. You need to pay the performance for all 100k of us whether your instance has 10 or 10k of those. Local users are just a bit extra demanding on your hosting resources.

                I suspect the bias we see here with larger instances paying a bit more (50-ish instead of 10-ish) is more due to reliability and snappyness than actual performance needs too. You tend to get optional smaller-gains pricier perks you might not go for for a smaller instance.

          • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
            22·
            13 days ago

            Looking at the domain name, they’re in Mali. Things must be cheap out there.

  • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    25·
    13 days ago

    Masto admin here. Small instance. 20ish users. costs me about 1€ per user.

    Most of the costs comes from media cache storage, so it would scale nicely if I had more users, but I want to keep it small

  • troed@fedia.io
    15·
    13 days ago

    @seb@ioc.exchange publishes the costs for ioc.exchange:

    Servers are hosted at Linode and hosting costs are around $300/month. Media files are hosted in AWS S3 and the costs are around $50/month. So in total our running costs are about $350/month.

    Unfortunately the donations still don’t cover it.

    This is your regular reminder that our hosting costs are roughly $350 per month. In the last 30 days you all have contributed $216. Thank you very much for everyone who has contributed - You are awesome!

    edit: User numbers from fedidb: 1,737 MAU, 26,315 total.

  • CRUMBGRABBER@lemm.eeEnglish
    14·
    13 days ago

    Interesting pattern emerging, the IT time of the admins is pretty damn priceless, (thank you admins!) but when an instance gets up to scale a lot of them can end up with a hard cost of 10 cents per user per month.

    The last stat I remember from Facebook was revenue per user per year was around 4 dollars. At 31b revenue and 2.7b monthly users, Youtubes average profit per user is about $10 per user per year. 100 million people pay for YT premium now.

    So if every user paid $1 per month, it might not pay all the costs but the admins could get paid something and the fediverse could scale. The bigger you get though, you get economies of scale from future Fediverse data centers, but also you need really good programmers because its a huge temptation for hackers and propagandists.

    I also want to say its a labor of love and a lot of work for mods too who may be non technical but the work and time they put in is important.

  • Tamlyn@lemmy.zipEnglish
    13·
    13 days ago

    Lemmy.zip stats can be found here: Lemmy.zip

    Our Admin gives us a monthly report. We are at 54$ while visitor count, rewlquest count can be seen at the report.

      • Tamlyn@lemmy.zipEnglish
        5·
        13 days ago

        Yes about 0.10$ per user. But we know only a few pay a bit more. Look at the open collective link on the post

      • Demigodrick@lemmy.zipEnglish
        4·
        13 days ago

        There are additional costs that aren’t factored in (although they’re not specifically lemmy, and I pay for them myself rather than use donations) such as a very cheap vps for our status.lemmy.zip page and i got a 3 year deal for an external email provider for less than some email providers wanted a month.

        Our server is the same one feddit.uk use (a hetzner auction server) although lemmy.zips I think was a touch more expensive per month. But it’s got a lot of room for growth.

        Also we now host all our backups offside too, which adds a little on top. I’ll probably cover this in the next server update.

        • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukEnglish
          3·
          11 days ago

          Our server is the same one feddit.uk use (a hetzner auction server)

          This is the route I’d recommend as you get superb specs for not much more than you’d be paying through the normal hosting, which, itself, is already very reasonable.

  • Valmond@lemmy.worldEnglish
    121·
    13 days ago

    I have my thinkcentre that I use as main PC on at all times, and it’s basically free in the autumn/winter/early spring as its energy consumption serves as a heater. And orherwise I use it. So say 100 nights uh to be generous 1000h a year for what, 30watt so 30kwh at under 0.2€ equals say 6€.

    I’m all alone on the server though so it costs 6€ a year per user I guess 😁

  • iso@lemy.lolEnglish
    9·
    13 days ago

    About $50 monthly for server, backups, image hosting, mails etc.

  • helenslunch@feddit.nlEnglish
    41·
    13 days ago

    Start your own for you. Open registration while keeping an eye on resources. When you hit hardware limits, close registration. Should be easy enough to manage moderation, and resources wouldn’t cost much more than the initial costs of running it just for yourself.