I will rent a v-server today with those specs: 2 CPU cores, 4GB RAM, 80GB disk space

I think it’s enough to run normal websites and even a game server, but I have no experience with the Fediverse.

Is this enough to run a few fediverse instances, like Lemmy and Mastodon or even others?

How much resources does Lemmy need in particular?

Thank you for your help.

  • Lemmy doesn’t really need much resources. Sopuli is running on a Hetzner VPS with similar specs and it’s all fine. I remember someone even running an instance on a ROCK64! Can’t really say anything about running multiple Fediverse services on the same VPS though.

  • That’s more than enough for when you’re just starting an instance. I’d even knock that down to 1 core 1 GB RAM, which is like $5 a month on a host like Linode or DigitalOcean. The reason Lemmy.ml is experiencing trouble is that it’s one of the largest instances, we didn’t have problems until recently. The great thing about a VPS is that you can upgrade whenever you want, so I’d recommend saving some money by getting the cheapest one until your instance starts getting a lot of users. Every VPS host I know of shows you the resource usage history, so you can monitor it once in a while and upgrade when one of the stats is getting close to 100%.

  • Not sure how relevant will this be to your question but the admin of the instance I’m on is quite transparent with the server performance etc. and perhaps it’ll provide some insight. Also quite interesting was the fact that storage itself is cheap but the bandwidth fees are not (from the comments).

    I still haven’t figured out how to correctly link to posts on other instances so I’m pasting a direct link hoping a friendly bot finds it and updates it: https://lemmy.zip/post/509553

  • I’m running 1 vCPU, 2GB of RAM and 25GB of disk at the moment for my tiny instance (we have like 5 users?). I started with 1GB of RAM but it quickly started swapping on disk and causing performance issues. I should probably bring it up to 4GB but it’s not necessary yet so I’m delaying.

    Something I’d like to implement is object storage for pictures (via AWS S3 bucket) as detailed here: https://lemmy.eus/comment/164368

    • I think it isn’t really sustainable to use one of the biggest energy wasters (like Amazon or Google), if the goal is to provide a green website, but that’s nothing I’ve mentioned in the first post, sorry…

  • Hi there! I pretty much have the same question. Probably also a question for the selfhosted sub if it already arrived here.

    I‘m thinking of hosting a lemmy instance, peertube and a minecraft server, the latter of which are very resource intensive and I‘m told I should look for „dedicated“ vcpus. Which drives the cost up considerably.

    Looking at hetzner rn but 3 vpus (1 for minecraft, 1 for peertube, 1 for everything else) is quite steep imo.

    Are you considering the dedicated part yet?

    Good luck :)