Best Providers for hosting a Lemmy Instance?
Best Providers for hosting a Lemmy Instance?
Over the next week or so I'm sure a lot of people are going to try spinning up Lemmy instances - I've certainly been looking at it.
Does anyone have any recommendations for a VPS provider / resource allocation?
From what I have read, it sounds like you're going to want a host that focuses on storage / bandwidth (at least if you are allowing image upload), but maybe those of you already operating an instance have a different opinion?
I run lemmy.world on a VPS at Hetzner. They are cheap and good. Storage: I now (after 11 days) have 2GB of images and 2GB of database.
I guess for context for anyone reading this, but after this post it looks like Ruud doubled RAM and CPU to 32 and 8 respectively.
Are you planning on pruning the database and images at some point, or is there some way to force external image hosting e.g. imgur.com ? Using 40GB for the o/s and swap, and 100GB for the site, at current levels of usage (not factoring in increased usage if more leave reddit), you're looking at about 275 days before running out of space.
Thanks for mentioning your provider, their prices are a lot cheaper then DO !
You're welcome!
Could you give us some insight into how much bandwidth up/down your instance is using? Thanks for posting your server specs. I'm tempted to self host an instance when I finally get a gigabit connection in the next few months.
This is great for reference. How many users you had while on that configs?
FYI for people looking for a fully managed hosting of Lemmy, we do have an offer starting at $10 including the hosting + management fees, more details here in our Introduction post: https://lemmy.ml/post/1206609
Or directly on our website: https://elest.io/open-source/lemmy
One other option is the "Always Free" tier on Oracle Cloud. You get some potato EPYC instances and some Altera ARM ones that are quite nice.
There are people who have issues with their accounts getting banned with no recourse, but I've used OCI free for over a year with no issues (and run a Mastodon instance on some of the ARM stuff), and know a good number of people who have various services running on it with no issue long-term, so YMMV.
The price is right, though, and you should keep current backups regardless.
I had this long post typed out on Jeroba about why I wouldn't recommend it, but maybe I hit the character limit? IDK. Anyway, the point I wanted to get across is that I've been down that road, and up until February it was going ok, but one should absolutely not trust the Oracle free tier for any service that should be reliable long term, they can and will take the VM down and take back that generous free tier allotment, and IIRC sometimes without any notice. In my case it was literally because my VM was under utilized. No option to downscale my instance, just a notification that they're taking my allotment back and deleting the VM a few weeks before it happened.
I just set one up via DigitalOcean and it was easy peasy. I'll see how it goes and move it if needed.
Proxmox at home xD
Home servers are the best, but I have very slow upload and there are security risks with this if you don't isolate the server properly.
I feel attacked xD
Are you able to host without a domain name? Looking to spin up one to see what the install process feels like before I spin up a production instance
Well in theory yes but no federation.
I haven’t tried, but I imagine federating will be a hassle without a clear way for the other services to exchange responses.
You can get a numerical xyz domain for less than a dollar each year.
I’ve used digital ocean with minimal fuss. I should write a start to finish guide on getting Lemmy going with one of their premade droplets.
If you ever get around to that guide I’d love a link.
Very basic but enough to get started/ https://novakeith.net/2023/06/14/setting-up-lemmy-on-a-digital-ocean-droplet/
Yes please! As a frontend dev I'm interested in contributing to the UI or writing my own, but I'm pretty lost when it comes to setting this stuff up to test it all out
This is a very basic first pass, let me know if this is helpful to you, and if not, where you end up getting stuck: https://novakeith.net/2023/06/14/setting-up-lemmy-on-a-digital-ocean-droplet/
Yea I wouldn’t mind knowing what the average storage size would be. I’m usually a linode user and I saw they were going to bring up adding lemmy to its marketplace.
Thanks for linking this
I just spun up my own (not even sure if posting here would work), but I'm running it on a relatively basic Linode. We will see how it goes over the next few days, but so far no issues
If you are a student you can get DigitalOcean free $200 and Azure free $100 through GitHub student dev pack.
just be careful not to go over on the free credits.
If you're willing to do the full VPS route like it seems, check out Hetzner. In my experience, it has higher resources at a lower cost than other providers like DO.
I have 4-5 nodes for miscellaneous projects hosted on cloudfanatic (previously servercheap). Cheap, good customer service, with servers all over the US. Good uptime. No international servers though.
Hetzner as always :) Although you probably want to separate out media storage to a standalone S3 provider or even just Hetzner's SMB storage box
Anything you can scale up and down in resources without having to upgrade hard drive space.
You might want to offload storage to some object storage service.
If you're looking for a smaller company check out m5hosting.com
