Discussion
Can anyone recommend some relatively affordable managed #Mastodon hosting?
We've been with the absolutely fantastic Masto.host since starting Writing.Exchange in 2017, but it's become prohibitively expensive -- especially for a community of only ~250 active users, as our hosting costs are about to increase another $50 to $589/month this month.
@matt Wow! That's too much imo.
This advice may be useless and/or not what you're looking for, but ...
... our server (with a few dozen people on it, a minority of which are heavily active) had such problems finding reliable and affordable hosting that two months ago we decided to self-host on a cloud provider
we are *somewhat* mediocre amateur coders but had zero, zero experience doing such online setup/maintenance
but we relied heavily on claude and ... damn, it works; works
@matt I know you said managed but at that price you’d get a really nice bare metal server and not have to worry for quite a while. Mine has been pretty low maintenance, not nearly as old or as big though.
@matt Though I understand your needs, you might be better off with a raspberry pi, a storage server (with some 16TB platters), and commercial internet.
Yeah it'll be expensive for about 6 months, then it'll be cheaper, as long as you put up some basic protections like Cloudflare (people might not like it, but it's better than not knowing what you're doing).
@shanie appreciate the advice, but that's too much work when we already have enough sysadmin work to keep us busy, which is why I'm looking for managed hosting.
We've already had to adjust our content retention settings to stay within our storage limits -- we currently delete content older than 5.5 years, which isn't ideal for an instance that's been running for 9 years. Still, our database grows constantly, currently exploding past 220 GB.
If you have any leads on a host that could accommodate us at a decent price, it'd be much appreciated!
Out of curiosity Matt (and love WF btw), what's the breakdown of that $$ between bandwidth, database and disk storage?
@tezoatlipoca It's all a flat cost every month, so not sure of specifics. I just know that our database continuously grows at a rate that means we either need to further limit our data retention or upgrade every 2 or 3 months, since that's what the subscription price is connected to.
(Also glad you enjoy WriteFreely!)
@matt well the reason I ask - and yes I acknowlege Im not being helpful by NOT answering your hosting questions - so feel free to ignore:
WF already serves statics: your css, the little client side js and the slug icons. I use this hack by mapping a folder (`/img`) out of the statics folder for images in my WF posts that end up being served from <instance>/imgs/<path+file>. Then I upload images via ftp or nfs or whatever.
Noone ever goes back and mods their old blog posts. So for old posts > <configurable time threshold> render the post as a static html page and serve it from the statics folder ($disk storage << $db) with a little bit of route map hackery to have the same URL serve up the same blog post in either static or dynamic form. Then quash that row in the db with a pointer to the static file, then garbage coll/compress the db. If you really want backwards compatibility, write encoded markdown source of the DB rows into the static html, or a
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