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Instance admins, how much does it cost you to run your instance? How much does that represent per active user? (feddit.org)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I meant the cost per user. You can't really compare total costs

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months 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.