I asked Jerry about everything. Here is the interview:
$5000 a month sounds a lot for forwarding text messages and images. According to the Fediverse Observer they have 12,000 active users (boils down to $5 per user a year), but still… Is it that much storage or computationally so expensive to federate posts?
I’ve always been surprised by cost numbers mentioned in services and donation requests.
I run my own cheap server which has game servers running in the past, and some other services. I’ve not run any busy services though or fediverse content so I never felt like I could make a reasonable assessment. Just be surprised.
Yes. I also have my own small VPS doing this (Piefed), Peertube, eMail, Nextcloud… for myself and family if they want. And that’s $8 a month. I wonder why it doesn’t scale down drastically with more users. I mean sure they generate a lot of requests. But then you only need to cache an image or pull in the posts and replies once for 12.000 users, while my server does that just for me. (Albeit for Lemmy, which is way smaller than Mastodon).
Same. My entire setup costs less than 5$ a month mostly in energy.
I used to run such things on my NAS/Server at home (And I still do, though I’m currently changing some things.) But in addition to the 4.50€ for ~20W of electricity, it was maybe 600€ for the machine, so another 5€ a month over 10 years. And then my internet contract is a bit more expensive because I need an IPv4 address which can do port forwarding… On the flipside, I can just attach a 10TB harddrive and have it available everywhere. And that’d be very expensive with a cloud service or hoster.
Sounds like a good setup. I have the equivalent of a raspberry pi haha.
Energy is extremely expensive where I’m at.
I think he mentioned he run 3 96-core servers for that instance to be running. Or something.
Wow. That is a lot of server power. And these things ain’t cheap.
They haven’t updated their wikis for Operating Costs or Hosting since late 2022, somewhat aligned with their blog post on handling the mass influx of users from “E-day”.
Back then this was 6 AMD 5950 16/32 with 128GB of RAM and 2x3.84TB SSDs, with one “storage provider” with an AMD epyc 32/64 with 400GB of RAM and 10TB of storage.
Their hosting provider doesn’t offer these same SKUs, but roughly equivalent could be about €200/mo for each of the former, and the beefiest high RAM option is like €800/mo, totalling €2K/mo?
Curious how much the infrastructure has grown, but I haven’t seen anything else. Even so, these costs are extremely high.
Good luck hacking, guys, but there’s no solution to that under capitalism. You just stumbled upon the ultimate contradiction. 🤷
At this point, you’re better of self-hosting, or even co-lo hosting. Cloud environments are good when you need to scale faster than servers can be shipped (or plan to scale down before the costs add up), but $5k a month is literally a new, decently-beefy server every 2-3 months.
In terms of solving the money issue, I feel like the only solution is a shared-cost/ shared-ownership model, where you get an initial pool of money together for the initial build-out, and then monthly costs are divided equally among all members. You can’t rely on donations, you need collectivism.
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