this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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What exactly is the cost of self hosting a Lemmy instance? Understandably you would want a powerful server, but that would be just a single one time purchase.

Where does the rest of the cost come in? Does it require more than a 2 gigabit connection and thus require a data centers 10 gigabit connection?

If I could run an instance on 2 gigabits and spending a 1-3 thousand on a server then I'd be interested in giving it a try.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I host an instance for myself. I have subscribed to many communities (10-20), and I run it on a 1 CPU + 1 GB RAM DigitalOcean droplet. However, the Lemmy instance was OOM-killed already once, and I expect that I have to upgrade eventually.

The droplet costs $6/month.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's strange, from what I've read a VPS like that should be able to handle at least 20 concurrent users.

Are you running anything else on the VPS?

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

Really weird. Might be a bug.

I can't find anyone else reporting memory usage problems. Maybe you could ask in the support community and see if anyone else has encountered the same problem.

Your VPS should be more than enough and you shouldn't have to spend more money because of a software issue.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"If you need to use the swap, you're doing it wrong" -- That's what I learned long ago. And it has held up so far.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Interesting. I've never heard that. I use swap all the time and it's saved me from OOM scenarios. I'm currently limited on RAM so maybe it makes more sense for my situation.

[–] vividspecter 5 points 1 year ago

zram and other compressed swap approaches can help too (with less of a performance hit) although I use real swap as a fallback. Some would recommend using zswap in that case, but I still want compression in ram to be heavily prioritised but YMMV.

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

Right? Like, my "first" machine had 512MB of ram in an era where most people were running 4GB. SWAP made more modern distributions possible for me. I mean, then again, that wasn't so much a choice than the harsh reality of growing up broke!

(My ACTUAL first machine was more like 64MB, but I never did much with it)

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

I have a laptop with an NVMe drive, and even using a swap on NVMe is orders of magnitude slower than RAM. Usually as soon as you have to swap, everything grinds to a halt quickly, and more stuff stacks up. You can decide for yourself, if you'd rather die a slow death or a quick death.

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

Yeah I definitely get that. By default, swap is supposed to be secondary to ram, usually swappiness is configured that way. I was not implying that swap was a replacement for RAM, just that it might save you from OOM situations in exchange for some performance dips.