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.
The 100Gb is on a volume which I can extend to 10TB, and then I can also add more volumes as I use LVM on linux. :-)
Right, that's what I'm planning to do for a personal instance as well. I'm just curious whether there is any way to prune the database of content older than say, 1 year. We're still early in the game for Lemmy adoption, so if usage picks up there must be some way to address it other than adding more disk space.
Nothing against them at all. I'm looking for something cheaper for my usecase. I want to host an instance just for myself and a couple friends.
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.
There's some talks about out-wards federation issues in which messages on big instances such as lemmy.world aren't federating outwards. Do you mind sharing the CPU and memory data from Zabbix? Also, do you have NTP configured on the server? I've seen a couple people, myself also included, seen "Header is expired" messages in our logs during federation, implying something is backed up or timing is off. I'm curious if the issues are server performance related, or time related, or something else all together.
Server is performing nicely. NTP (timesyncd) is running. I have no idea how to see federation queues. Please contact me on matrix @ruud:h-y-p-e-r.space if you want to troubleshoot together.
I'm brand new to the fediverse; tried to message you via Matrix using Element -- @chiisana:matrix.org -- not sure if I did it correctly or tried to invite you to a room on the Lemmy space. Hope we can some how connect :)
Not sure about seeing queue stats directly but the logs should be pretty noisy if there aren't enough federation workers to process the queue efficiently.
There was info from the devs here: https://lemmy.ml/post/1216911
E: I see you already commented there, so you already know. It seems the value was raised to 160k by the lemmy.ml instance though
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.
Yeah, I should probably have included that I did convert the account to pay-as-you-go from the free-only service to avoid the reclaiming.
I've had zero issues, but I know that is, for sure, not the exclusive experience people have had.
Tried doing this as well (should have mentioned), but I'm broke asf and the $100? authorization charge attempted to overdraw my account and it rejected the charge. So in the end, no recourse for me. IMO it's ok for unimportant things that it was just me using, but if I'm going to take on the responsibility for operating an instance for anyone else (potentially 1000's of users) I just can't trust that Oracle will keep my instance safe in the long term if they decide to change their usage terms in the future.
Oh for sure; if I really am concerned with hosting something, I pay for a VPS somewhere. OCI is for things that, I'd prefer them to stay up, but if they don't, it's not catastrophically bad.
Oracle's 'too bad so sad' support policy around this is absolute garbage, though.
Oracle’s ‘too bad so sad’ support policy around this is absolute garbage, though.
Oh I've heard some of the horror stories too. I was subbed to OracleCloud? I think for the major duration and realized fairly early that the hammer would come down eventually, so I made sure to have religious backups for my admittedly disposable services.
Yeah, heard the same stories.
I'll admit some bias against some of them because I spent most of the last decade doing abuse and anti-fraud work for another cloud hosting provider, and boy did I ever hear an endless parade of 'oh but I wasn't doing anything!' stories - even when I had absolute hard evidence that they were, indeed, doing something.
Still, you could always get a human and the human could make a decision and reverse any account action after looking at your account and talking to you - which is something that Oracle seems to absolutely not do, which is just... stupid? The people they're banning are, at some point, going to be asked 'hey have you used a cloud provider you like?' and absolutely zero of them would ever recommend OCI.
I can only imagine the stories you have too. There were plenty of let's say "suspicious" posts I've seen that were complaining of unannounced termination that I kinda suspect were either doing something illegal or against the EULA like mining crypto. But yeah agree that it would have made a big difference if I could appeal to OCI support and see if there was an alternative to removing the VM. But in the end people will probably keep getting hooked in on Oracle's free tier, I just hope they're making sure to be careful not to trust them too much.
I just set one up via DigitalOcean and it was easy peasy. I'll see how it goes and move it if needed.
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.
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
I haven’t tried, but I imagine federating will be a hassle without a clear way for the other services to exchange responses.
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.
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.
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.
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/
Very basic but enough to get started/ https://novakeith.net/2023/06/14/setting-up-lemmy-on-a-digital-ocean-droplet/
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.
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.
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.