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?
Ruud ( @ruud@lemmy.world ) English46•1 year agoI 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.
kinther ( @kinther@lemmy.world ) English7•1 year agoAre 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.
Ruud ( @ruud@lemmy.world ) English6•1 year agoThe 100Gb is on a volume which I can extend to 10TB, and then I can also add more volumes as I use LVM on linux. :-)
kinther ( @kinther@lemmy.world ) English7•1 year agoRight, 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.
Richard ( @Richard@lemmy.world ) English6•1 year agoI guess for context for anyone reading this, but after this post it looks like Ruud doubled RAM and CPU to 32 and 8 respectively.
majorswitcher ( @majorswitcher@lemmyfly.org ) English5•1 year agoThanks for mentioning your provider, their prices are a lot cheaper then DO !
Ruud ( @ruud@lemmy.world ) English1•1 year agoYou’re welcome!
Kris ( @Kris@lemmy.world ) English3•1 year agoWill probably move my instance there. Have it on digital ocean.
jbenguira ( @admin@lemmy.elest.io ) English15•1 year agoFYI 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
cstine ( @cstine@lemmy.uncomfortable.business ) English14•1 year agoOne 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.
sneakyninjapants ( @sneakyninjapants@sh.itjust.works ) English8•1 year agoI 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.
cstine ( @cstine@lemmy.uncomfortable.business ) English2•1 year agoYeah, 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.
sneakyninjapants ( @sneakyninjapants@sh.itjust.works ) English2•1 year agoTried 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.
cstine ( @cstine@lemmy.uncomfortable.business ) English2•1 year agoOh 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.
sneakyninjapants ( @sneakyninjapants@sh.itjust.works ) English2•1 year agoOracle’s ‘too bad so sad’ support policy around this is absolute garbage, though.
Oh I’ve heard some of the horror stories too. I was subbed to OracleCloud? I think for the major duration and realized fairly early that the hammer would come down eventually, so I made sure to have religious backups for my admittedly disposable services.
cstine ( @cstine@lemmy.uncomfortable.business ) English2•1 year agoYeah, heard the same stories.
I’ll admit some bias against some of them because I spent most of the last decade doing abuse and anti-fraud work for another cloud hosting provider, and boy did I ever hear an endless parade of ‘oh but I wasn’t doing anything!’ stories - even when I had absolute hard evidence that they were, indeed, doing something.
Still, you could always get a human and the human could make a decision and reverse any account action after looking at your account and talking to you - which is something that Oracle seems to absolutely not do, which is just… stupid? The people they’re banning are, at some point, going to be asked ‘hey have you used a cloud provider you like?’ and absolutely zero of them would ever recommend OCI.
sneakyninjapants ( @sneakyninjapants@sh.itjust.works ) English2•1 year agoI can only imagine the stories you have too. There were plenty of let’s say “suspicious” posts I’ve seen that were complaining of unannounced termination that I kinda suspect were either doing something illegal or against the EULA like mining crypto. But yeah agree that it would have made a big difference if I could appeal to OCI support and see if there was an alternative to removing the VM. But in the end people will probably keep getting hooked in on Oracle’s free tier, I just hope they’re making sure to be careful not to trust them too much.
pinkpatrol ( @pinkpatrol@anarch.is ) English9•1 year agoI just set one up via DigitalOcean and it was easy peasy. I’ll see how it goes and move it if needed.
BenDoubleU ( @BenDoubleU@lemmy.world ) English9•1 year agoYea 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.
Kris ( @Kris@lemmy.world ) English2•1 year agoThanks for linking this
casey ( @casey@lemmy.wiuf.net ) English9•1 year agoProxmox at home xD
devrand ( @devrand@lemmy.projectsegfau.lt ) English13•1 year agoHome servers are the best, but I have very slow upload and there are security risks with this if you don’t isolate the server properly.
JeremyT ( @JeremyT@lemmy.world ) English3•1 year agoI feel attacked xD
devexxis ( @aceospos@lemmy.ml ) English2•1 year agoAre you able to host without a domain name? Looking to spin up one to see what the install process feels like before I spin up a production instance
devrand ( @devrand@lemmy.projectsegfau.lt ) English7•1 year agoWell in theory yes but no federation.
casey ( @casey@lemmy.wiuf.net ) English3•1 year agoI haven’t tried, but I imagine federating will be a hassle without a clear way for the other services to exchange responses.
Virtim ( @Virtim@lemmy.virtim.dev ) English7•1 year agoI just spun up my own (not even sure if posting here would work), but I’m running it on a relatively basic Linode. We will see how it goes over the next few days, but so far no issues
devrand ( @devrand@lemmy.projectsegfau.lt ) English6•1 year agoIf you are a student you can get DigitalOcean free $200 and Azure free $100 through GitHub student dev pack.
Brien ( @Brien@lemmy.world ) English6•1 year agojust be careful not to go over on the free credits.
KNova ( @knova@links.dartboard.social ) English4•1 year agoI’ve used digital ocean with minimal fuss. I should write a start to finish guide on getting Lemmy going with one of their premade droplets.
freejosh ( @freejosh@lemmy.ca ) English1•1 year agoYes please! As a frontend dev I’m interested in contributing to the UI or writing my own, but I’m pretty lost when it comes to setting this stuff up to test it all out
turner ( @turner@beehaw.org ) English4•1 year agoI have 4-5 nodes for miscellaneous projects hosted on cloudfanatic (previously servercheap). Cheap, good customer service, with servers all over the US. Good uptime. No international servers though.
pivotraze ( @pivotraze@infosec.pub ) English4•1 year agoIf you’re willing to do the full VPS route like it seems, check out Hetzner. In my experience, it has higher resources at a lower cost than other providers like DO.
captainastronaut ( @captainastronaut@seattlelunarsociety.org ) English3•1 year agoI’m using https://www.knthost.com/ and really happy with them so far
Wander ( @Wander@yiffit.net ) English2•1 year agoAnything you can scale up and down in resources without having to upgrade hard drive space.
You might want to offload storage to some object storage service.