Selfhosted @lemmy.world zygo_histo_morpheus @programming.dev 4mo ago

Anyone run a matrix server in the cloud? How much does it cost you?

Toying with the idea of setting this up for myself, maybe a few bridges, maybe a few group chats on matrix itself. What kind of cost should I expect?

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Matrix servers have the problem of highly variable resource use.

Basically if you only use it for some light chatting with friends and family and some niche topic public rooms it isn't very heavy.

But if any user of your homeserver joins any busy rooms or uses the bridges to join busy public Telegram channels or such, it will quickly outgrow the resources of a reasonably priced VPS.

Personally I would rather recommend you to set up an xmpp server, which can include a gateway to Matrix and other services, but architecturally is much more lightweight and has better mobile clients.
- Better mobile clients? Have things changed this much in the least three years?
  
  Matrix mobile clients got worse, yes 😅
  
  Otherwise not really. Three years ago Conversations was quite good already, although the newer forks Cheogram and Monocles added some nice convenience features.
  
  I found snikket to be quite decent, give it a whirl.
- How is the user experience compared to matrix? Is it easy to gateway towards matrix or other services? Can I easily join matrix or other communities servers?
  
  I see a lot of people are now using matrix but not so many xmpp, but yeah it hoggs resources on my server too. Also I feel like it's still pretty buggy..
  
  Xmpp itself works great. The slidge.im bridges are relatively new and your mileage will vary. Matrix, Discord and Telegram works ok, Signal & Facebook messenger have issues right now, WhatsApp is a bit tricky to set up properly.
- ooh! how do we bridge to matrix from xmpp server?
  
  edit all i can find is how to do it from a matrix server
  
  https://slidge.im/
  
  It basicallly allows you to remote control an existing Matrix account on a remote homeserver. Works quite well.
I pay 6.84€ a month for a VPS plus 4.65€ a year for the domain. That gets me a VPS with 4 cores and 8GB of RAM so in addition to Matrix, I can also fit a few Fediverse services, Nextcloud, a homepage, ...
- Since you seem happy : Any recommendations for VPS provider ?
  
  I'm with netcup.com and I've been happy. But some people complained their support isn't the best and they sometimes don't answer. I'm not sure about the details as I've never needed support. Maybe you want to ask someone else. And make sure to choose the correct server location as most of their servers are located in Europe and you don't want that latency if you're living in the USA.
For something like that, you'd want a VPS with 2-4 cores, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD. Any less and you'll start to run into problems when adding bridges and stuff.

So, it's really a matter of what deals you can find in that bracket, and if you care about the geographical region it's hosted in. Usually https://lowendtalk.com/ is a good place to start looking at options.
- Love Lowend. Just grabbed this deal from massiveGRID. Never heard of them, but I took a chance;
  
  4 Shared Intel Xeon CPU vCores 8 RAM DDR4 ECC Registered (GB) 256 Primary High Availability SSD Storage (GB) 20 TB Guaranteed Internet Traffic 1 IP Addresses
  
  I paid $141.28 for 3 years, and replied on their forum post for Lowend and they added 1 extra year of service for free, and activated lifetime pricing. So it works out to be about $2.95/mo which is a damn great price. The only real drawbacks are the network is 1 Gbps shared** and no IPv6 (they're adding it over the next several weeks looks like).
  
  **speedtest;
  
  [root@dev ~]$ speedtest --secure Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Testing from Massivegrid (xx.xx.xx.xx)... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Selecting best server based on ping... Hosted by Wnet (New York, NY) [0.09 km]: 2.429 ms Testing download speed................................................................................ Download: 1028.91 Mbit/s Testing upload speed...................................................................................................... Upload: 997.58 Mbit/s
  
  So not absolutely mindblowing, but you seem to get the full 1 Gbps, which is great. I contacted support and they'll be offering VDS plans soon with access to higher than 1 Gbps speeds. Super happy so far.
Be careful. My disk usage is well over 8gb after bridging my WhatsApp and telegram chats...

In the clouds I would be worried about storage costs.
- I think for matrix to be usable in a homelab setting, Matrix needs to enable a way to handle these huge data storage with prune or something similar.
@zygo_histo_morpheus If you don’t mind being powered by Oracle, the free tier OCI is pretty generous
- I upvoted your comment but man I wouldn’t even take a freebie from Oracle. Just an absolutely rotten company and Larry Ellison is one of the worst humans on the planet.
12 to 40 bucks a year depebding on which racknerd vps yiu need. I spend aboit 15 a yaet on mine but it only has me and my facebookessenger slidge bridge
You might wanna check out this article: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/matrix-vs-xmpp/

I found it after I already settled with snikket.im The mobile application is reliable and there is Conversation as desktop client. From my point of view, the audio and video quality of Snikket are way better than Matrix.

It worth mentioning that initially I wanted to set up a Matrix server also, but I had second thoughts because I knew how resource intensive are the mobile app and the server also.
- @tuxec @zygo_histo_morpheus Is "soyware" related to the pejorative "soyboy"?
  
  I don't know. I read it as "an interior piece of software"

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