Best Providers for hosting a Lemmy Instance?
3 years ago by CMahaff to c/selfhosted
Over the next week or so I'm sure a lot of people are going to try spinning up Lemmy instances - I've certainly been looking at it.
Does anyone have any recommendations for a VPS provider / resource allocation?
From what I have read, it sounds like you're going to want a host that focuses on storage / bandwidth (at least if you are allowing image upload), but maybe those of you already operating an instance have a different opinion?
I guess for context for anyone reading this, but after this post it looks like Ruud doubled RAM and CPU to 32 and 8 respectively.
Are you planning on pruning the database and images at some point, or is there some way to force external image hosting e.g. imgur.com ? Using 40GB for the o/s and swap, and 100GB for the site, at current levels of usage (not factoring in increased usage if more leave reddit), you're looking at about 275 days before running out of space.
Right, that's what I'm planning to do for a personal instance as well. I'm just curious whether there is any way to prune the database of content older than say, 1 year. We're still early in the game for Lemmy adoption, so if usage picks up there must be some way to address it other than adding more disk space.
Thanks for mentioning your provider, their prices are a lot cheaper then DO !
Could you give us some insight into how much bandwidth up/down your instance is using? Thanks for posting your server specs. I'm tempted to self host an instance when I finally get a gigabit connection in the next few months.
There's some talks about out-wards federation issues in which messages on big instances such as lemmy.world aren't federating outwards. Do you mind sharing the CPU and memory data from Zabbix? Also, do you have NTP configured on the server? I've seen a couple people, myself also included, seen "Header is expired" messages in our logs during federation, implying something is backed up or timing is off. I'm curious if the issues are server performance related, or time related, or something else all together.
Server is performing nicely. NTP (timesyncd) is running. I have no idea how to see federation queues. Please contact me on matrix @ruud:h-y-p-e-r.space if you want to troubleshoot together.
FYI for people looking for a fully managed hosting of Lemmy, we do have an offer starting at $10 including the hosting + management fees, more details here in our Introduction post: https://lemmy.ml/post/1206609
Or directly on our website: https://elest.io/open-source/lemmy
One other option is the "Always Free" tier on Oracle Cloud. You get some potato EPYC instances and some Altera ARM ones that are quite nice.
There are people who have issues with their accounts getting banned with no recourse, but I've used OCI free for over a year with no issues (and run a Mastodon instance on some of the ARM stuff), and know a good number of people who have various services running on it with no issue long-term, so YMMV.
The price is right, though, and you should keep current backups regardless.
I had this long post typed out on Jeroba about why I wouldn't recommend it, but maybe I hit the character limit? IDK. Anyway, the point I wanted to get across is that I've been down that road, and up until February it was going ok, but one should absolutely not trust the Oracle free tier for any service that should be reliable long term, they can and will take the VM down and take back that generous free tier allotment, and IIRC sometimes without any notice. In my case it was literally because my VM was under utilized. No option to downscale my instance, just a notification that they're taking my allotment back and deleting the VM a few weeks before it happened.
Yeah, I should probably have included that I did convert the account to pay-as-you-go from the free-only service to avoid the reclaiming.
I've had zero issues, but I know that is, for sure, not the exclusive experience people have had.
Tried doing this as well (should have mentioned), but I'm broke asf and the $100? authorization charge attempted to overdraw my account and it rejected the charge. So in the end, no recourse for me. IMO it's ok for unimportant things that it was just me using, but if I'm going to take on the responsibility for operating an instance for anyone else (potentially 1000's of users) I just can't trust that Oracle will keep my instance safe in the long term if they decide to change their usage terms in the future.
Oh for sure; if I really am concerned with hosting something, I pay for a VPS somewhere. OCI is for things that, I'd prefer them to stay up, but if they don't, it's not catastrophically bad.
Oracle's 'too bad so sad' support policy around this is absolute garbage, though.
Yea I wouldn’t mind knowing what the average storage size would be. I’m usually a linode user and I saw they were going to bring up adding lemmy to its marketplace.
I just set one up via DigitalOcean and it was easy peasy. I'll see how it goes and move it if needed.
This is a very basic first pass, let me know if this is helpful to you, and if not, where you end up getting stuck: https://novakeith.net/...
Very basic but enough to get started/ https://novakeith.net/...
I'm using https://www.knthost.com/ and really happy with them so far
If you're looking for a smaller company check out m5hosting.com
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@lemmy.world
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil.
No spam.
Posts are to be related to self-hosting.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.
Submission headline should match the article title.
No trolling.
Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the links in Rule 8 for details.
AI-related discussions and AI-involved promotional posts have additional requirements for tagging, as noted in Rule 7 and the AI & Promotional Post Expanded Rules post, and find example disclosures here.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
go to feed...
I run lemmy.world on a VPS at Hetzner. They are cheap and good. Storage: I now (after 11 days) have 2GB of images and 2GB of database.
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