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Is it fairly cheap to host your own personal, single-user Lemmy instance? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 2 months ago by Moc to c/[email protected]

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Let's say I decided that instead of blogging, I wanted to host my own Lemmy instance that contained a maximum of one (1) user– me, but allowing other users to subscribe.

To show what I'm talking about, look at how kaidomac uses Reddit as his own personal microblog, which people subscribe to.

What is the cheapest way to do this?

My mental model of Lemmy is that if I were to do this, the instance would still be caching information from other instances. This would– at least in my mine– add up in costs.

I'm a software engineer, so feel free to use technical jargon.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'm not sure how much you're willing to write off as "basically free", but electricity does add up for running your own server.

[–] ch00f 16 points 2 months ago (3 children)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=200w%2A1%20year%20%2A%240.14%2FkWh

$245/year assuming constant 200W load which is pretty reasonable for a small web server.

The trick is to have the server do other things like print, Plex, Piwigo, Samba, Shinobi, Frigate, Matrix, etc

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

My Plex/*arr Intel NUC server uses like 50-75W under heavy load and maybe 5W at idle, and I can't imagine it's not powerful enough to run a small Lemmy instance, so even this figure seems a little high to me.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Same, but even lower (Beelink N95). My whole stack of two NAS units, mini PC, switch, router, and modem average a load of 50 watts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Uhh... maybe putting a 9700k in my server wasnt as good of an idea as i thought it to be... it eats 74watts in idle... uhhh...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeahhhh...

Obviously it can all depend on your requirements, but this N95 system has been pretty eye opening on how much people are over-speccing their builds for home server use. It has 8Gb of memory in it, but I seldom see it use more than 2. The box is doing DNS, Jellyfin, torrenting, VPN, private git, etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I should.. probably get one of these n100 mobo that you can find on aliexpress...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

… for a small web server.

It’s not just a small web server. It’s a dedicated server with full root access and 24/7 direct hardware access without any extra costs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

If you were worried about saving energy, you would be running an XMPP server over Matrix. Matrix has similarly expensive requirements as Lemmy but Prosody or ejabberd can hum in the background.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

It depends on how powerful of a machine you need. My server only costs about $9.25/mo to run and it is way overpowered for the services I run on it.