This is a concern, but luckily this isn't required. I set up hobbit.world to host my Tolkien related communities. It only costs $6 a month plus the $35/yr for the domain name to host a tiny instance like this. I don't need to depend on anyone but my hosting provider.

To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.

But the point is that for big communities that people put a lot of time into, there should be an instance for each one owned by one of the mods.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.

Maybe look into borg and https://www.borgbase.com/ - they give 10gb free. I sat it up for some important data I would want to keep if utter disaster struck yesterday, and was pretty straight forward.

You could also set up a more ghetto time machine like rsync with https://github.com/laurent22/rsync-time-backup if you have a machine on your network with ssh access from outside.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It only costs $6 a month plus the $35/yr for the domain name

My man, you are getting absolutely bent over a barrel by your registrar. You could get that domain significantly cheaper at a place like Porkbun or Namecheap.

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

I actually use namecheap. It's only a few bucks first year, but .world domains cost $31.98 per year after that. So not $35 like I remembered, but pretty close. Or maybe that is the price with tax.

However, if I wanted a .nl domain, it's only $7.98 per year. Looking at other domains, it's crazy, but .inc is $2198 per year.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Gotcha. I'm actually in the process of moving away from Namecheap because of an experience I just had with them. I tried to register a domain about a month ago (the domain my Lemmy instance is on) and it stopped the registration process immediately after I hit the Pay/Checkout/whatever button and told me to contact their support team to register it.

The error message said it was because the domain name was too similar to something that already existed, and that the support team would have to decide whether I'd be allowed to register it or not. So I went to another registrar and registered it with no issue. I really didn't like that, and it's enough to make them lose me as a decade+ long customer. I already use Route53 for DNS for all my domains, so it's not like I was using them for anything else other than a registrar, so untangling that shouldn't be too much of a pain.

[–] Historical_General -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Is it open like an instance or is it for hosting communities only?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If you're asking what the $6 gets, I'm talking about a single shard which allows me to host a Linux instance that runs a Lemmy instance. I wasn't sure if that was sufficient, but honestly, the performance via Jerboa is better than when I was using an account on lemmy.world. It has only been a week, so don't know how much disk will get used up over time. Long term I might need to bump things up for storage.

[–] Historical_General -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh, I meant would people be able to make accounts on it? Or is it purely for hosting communities?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

At the moment, just communities. I thought about letting people make accounts, and might still do it, but I don't want the responsibility until I'm sure the system is reliable without much extra work. It seems like the lemmy.world people are running into a lot of problems.