I joined the fediverse like 2 weeks ago. I'm trying to find the answers to all my doubts reading discussions around, watching videos etc, but there are still some questions I'm looking an answer for. Here they are:

Is having a own hosted server a suggested practice? I could see some benefits, like not having to worry about which instance to join or having the full control of your own account. Furthermore, it's maybe more "professional"? Like @myname@mycustomdomain is maybe better than @[email protected] ? I don't know, I'm asking.
What are the server costs to keep an instance alive? I know it depends on the amount of users and -I think- the bandwidth used, but what's a common range of the costs per year, just to have a rough idea? (Like 50/100€ per year?)
What managing an instance involves? I'm not talking about a self hosted instance now, I'm referring to a medium/big instance with many users and communities. I'm asking this question to better comprehend what are the difficulties the owner/owners of an instance may face and so what could make them shut down the instance in the long term.
What happens exactly to an account when the instance in which it is registered shuts down? Is the account lost? It can still be migrated to a different instance?
What exactly change in my user experience if I decide to migrate to a different instance? I potentially see less contents? It just changes the posts I see in the "local" page?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I can only answer 4 and 5. At least based on my knowledge voming from mastodon ,which should mirror here.

Yep, your account is lost, no way to access it. It is common for instances of appropriate size to tell the users that they are shutting down thus giving people time to migrate. Accounts on mastodon can migrate at least, which carries over your followers to the new account but not your post and messages. Don't really know about migration on lemmy though, last time I checked it is not currently a feature and I don't see much purpose since people don't have followers and there is no karma. Instances probably will announce if they are shutting down for archiving purposes or just common courtesy.
Local changes as you said. What you see can vary slightly, for example if your instance blocks other instances or users you won't be able to see the content submitted by those blocked, be it posts or comments even if they are on other servers. Alternatively your new instance could be blocked by some and thus altering the content slightly.