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I would bet the cost would be lower if you use Digital Ocean/Linode and CloudFlare. Both have 5USD instances with no egress costs at these scales. No need to co

I would bet the cost would be lower if you use Digital Ocean/Linode and CloudFlare. Both have 5USD instances with no egress costs at these scales. No need to commit for three years or anything. If you already own a domain you can use a subdomain and cut even that cost although it might make up for a long URL. I think the main cost here is time. Probably far more expensive than all of those costs. Even on AWS.

x86hacker1010 4y ago
Came to say this. I think I see a lot of people default to AWS, maybe because their employer uses them and it's what they know. The downside is that AWS has all this expense for fancy stuff that can be done usually with a cheap instance, docker and nginx. - Cloudflare for caching, DNS, domains. - Hetzner, Linode or DO for a cheap instance See what does/doesn't work. Storagebox on Hetzner is cheaper storage hosting and you can have redundant backups for cheap on backblaze as well or offshore cheap VPS doing encrypted backups with rclone/rsync.
- f6v 4y ago
  > I think I see a lot of people default to AWS, maybe because their employer uses them and it's what they know I don’t get why people assume others are just mindless fruit flies in these threads. Maybe OP just doesn’t want to fiddle with technology and pays Amazon to simply get it done. That’s what I’d do, there’s no need to turn every project into excercise in orchestrating open-source software.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    AWS is wayyy too complicated to "simply get it done" for a single user. It makes no sense to learn all that if you just do it for yourself. In fact I have to do a bit of AWS for work and I hate it with a passion. It's spread over a ton of services each with their own console (that look & feel like they were designed by completely different people), lots of overlap between services, complex billing. Configuration often needs to be done with complex json files. Ugh. Perhaps it makes sense for a major enterprise where you have orchestration for everything. But I would never pick this total mess for a personal project. Azure has a bad name but at least everything is integrated in the same console pretty nicely. But really if you just need an instance of something for personal use, DigitalOcean, Scaleway etc are so much simpler. And cheaper, and most stuff is just included in the monthly price so you don't get billing surprises.
  - x86hacker1010 4y ago
    IIRC the author literally said he doesn’t know much about Cloud or AWS
- cultofmetatron 4y ago
  aws is the ibm of cloud. As a CTO, I'm beholden both to my cofounders and our investors. I'd rather spend my energy defending or pushing novel engineering practices or directions for our tech stack rather than going to DO or hetzner. also AWS is huge and their reliability is damn good. Plus its relatively easy to get in contact with a real support engineer when shit its the fan. When you have a lot of customers depending on your software to "just work." That premium is worthwhile.
  - x86hacker1010 4y ago
    Yah totally but we aren’t really talking about enterprise grade stuff here man. We are talking about self hosting projects
    - cultofmetatron 4y ago
      For personal projects, I'd agree with you. sorry I misread your original statement. though I'd also throw linode into that ring
vxNsr 4y ago
This guy works at AWS. I’m guessing that’s the main reason he’s using it.
- comprev 4y ago
  So it's a sneaky marketing blog then. AWS - "Free to get data in, expensive to get out"
  - dnissley 4y ago
    Pretty sure this is not a secret to anyone that has ever used AWS
    - gumboza 4y ago
      Some people are still crying when it costs $500 to do a backup restore. They will learn one day.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - cowsandmilk 4y ago
    > sneaky marketing blog What’s sneaky? OP states at the beginning of the post they’re a solutions architect at AWS… and provides reasons you may not want to use AWS if you want your own single user mastodon instance.
scrollaway 4y ago
Nope it wouldn’t be. I run my single user instance on DO. I haven’t looked at the exact costs but they are higher. First of all, a 5USD/mo instance cannot run mastodon. Mastodon needs a lot of resources from the get go, even with one user. Second, you’ll want to enable backups, which is 20 percent of instance cost as extra. Third, you will want more disk space than is available on a base instance. Mastodon is huge and disk space is taken up pretty quickly. With AWS you can set up autoscaling drives, DO doesn’t. So, more costs… Finally, if you want to use DO Spaces, that is a flat 5USD/mo. AWS S3 is far cheaper for what would be used in this instance, on the order of free tier or couple of cents. The OP did the set up incorrectly which is why their costs are far higher. I actually did set up AWS S3 on my DO instance and the costs are extremely low. So why am I using DO? I have credits on it, that’s all. I’ll move to AWS and probably set up Takahe at some point: https://docs.jointakahe.org/ https://docs.jointakahe.org/
- invalidname 4y ago
  Interesting. I'm mostly on Linode and don't run a Mastodon instance. I did the back of the envelope calculations based on numbers from google but I guess you would know better. In Linode you can get additional block storage for a relatively low cost: https://www.linode.com/pricing/#block-storage https://www.linode.com/pricing/#block-storage So a 5 or 10USD instance should be enough. I will say that S3 is very expensive not because of the upfront cost. It's because of traffic. Also cloudflare is more affordable than AWS.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    Traffic will be negligible on a single user instance. It’s also possible to put cloudflare in front of it (needs extra configuration I couldn’t figure out before my patience ran out though).
    - invalidname 4y ago
      The main reason I bring up cloudflare is due to OPs discussion of cloudfront and S3. S3 is unusable and expensive without a CDN.
berns 4y ago
> Both have 5USD instances DigitalOcean no longer has a USD 5 instance, it's USD 6 now.
- invalidname 4y ago
  Thanks for the update. I'm shocked they raised that.
- AlchemistCamp 4y ago
  They increased what was provided in the old $5 a couple of times, before raising the price to $6, though. Also, there’s a new $4 entry-tier droplet that has the same CPU, the same amount of ram and the same amount of storage as my $5 droplet used to: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets The included bandwidth is only half as much (500GiB), but I suspect most people who would have gotten $5 droplets in the past will now be getting $4 ones.
  - berns 4y ago
    As far as I can remember, the $5 droplet always had 1 GB of RAM. The current $4 droplet is only 0.5 GB. The AWS instance in the post, t4g.small, has 2 GB of RAM. So it's not really comparable to the $4 DO droplet.
    - AlchemistCamp 4y ago
      My $5/month droplet started at 0.5 GB and the free upgrade to 1 GB of ram wasn’t even that long ago. Perhaps the image on this link will jog your memory of the old $5/month droplet stats: https://tutorialforest.com/upgrade-digitalocean-droplet-plans/ https://tutorialforest.com/upgrade-digitalocean-droplet-plan... Also, FWIW, I’ve load tested different VPSes between AWS, Linode and DO and found that for reasons I don’t understand, AWS ones perform considerably worse than the other two platforms VPSes with identically listed stats.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Try Scaleway, stardust. You can only have 2 but they are 2 euro a month. And free bandwidth. I really like them (Note: I have mentioned them several times in this thread but I have no affiliation or commercial interest - just a happy customer).
rsynnott 4y ago
Yeah, if you want to do this as cheaply as possible, you certainly don’t want to use AWS. In particular using s3 seems difficult to justify. That said I assume the author is not trying for cheapest-possible.

x86hacker1010 4y ago

Came to say this. I think I see a lot of people default to AWS, maybe because their employer uses them and it's what they know. The downside is that AWS has all this expense for fancy stuff that can be done usually with a cheap instance, docker and nginx. - Cloudflare for caching, DNS, domains. - Hetzner, Linode or DO for a cheap instance See what does/doesn't work. Storagebox on Hetzner is cheaper storage hosting and you can have redundant backups for cheap on backblaze as well or offshore cheap VPS doing encrypted backups with rclone/rsync.

f6v 4y ago
> I think I see a lot of people default to AWS, maybe because their employer uses them and it's what they know I don’t get why people assume others are just mindless fruit flies in these threads. Maybe OP just doesn’t want to fiddle with technology and pays Amazon to simply get it done. That’s what I’d do, there’s no need to turn every project into excercise in orchestrating open-source software.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  AWS is wayyy too complicated to "simply get it done" for a single user. It makes no sense to learn all that if you just do it for yourself. In fact I have to do a bit of AWS for work and I hate it with a passion. It's spread over a ton of services each with their own console (that look & feel like they were designed by completely different people), lots of overlap between services, complex billing. Configuration often needs to be done with complex json files. Ugh. Perhaps it makes sense for a major enterprise where you have orchestration for everything. But I would never pick this total mess for a personal project. Azure has a bad name but at least everything is integrated in the same console pretty nicely. But really if you just need an instance of something for personal use, DigitalOcean, Scaleway etc are so much simpler. And cheaper, and most stuff is just included in the monthly price so you don't get billing surprises.
- x86hacker1010 4y ago
  IIRC the author literally said he doesn’t know much about Cloud or AWS
cultofmetatron 4y ago
aws is the ibm of cloud. As a CTO, I'm beholden both to my cofounders and our investors. I'd rather spend my energy defending or pushing novel engineering practices or directions for our tech stack rather than going to DO or hetzner. also AWS is huge and their reliability is damn good. Plus its relatively easy to get in contact with a real support engineer when shit its the fan. When you have a lot of customers depending on your software to "just work." That premium is worthwhile.
- x86hacker1010 4y ago
  Yah totally but we aren’t really talking about enterprise grade stuff here man. We are talking about self hosting projects
  - cultofmetatron 4y ago
    For personal projects, I'd agree with you. sorry I misread your original statement. though I'd also throw linode into that ring

vxNsr 4y ago

This guy works at AWS. I’m guessing that’s the main reason he’s using it.

comprev 4y ago
So it's a sneaky marketing blog then. AWS - "Free to get data in, expensive to get out"
- dnissley 4y ago
  Pretty sure this is not a secret to anyone that has ever used AWS
  - gumboza 4y ago
    Some people are still crying when it costs $500 to do a backup restore. They will learn one day.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cowsandmilk 4y ago
  > sneaky marketing blog What’s sneaky? OP states at the beginning of the post they’re a solutions architect at AWS… and provides reasons you may not want to use AWS if you want your own single user mastodon instance.

scrollaway 4y ago

Nope it wouldn’t be. I run my single user instance on DO. I haven’t looked at the exact costs but they are higher. First of all, a 5USD/mo instance cannot run mastodon. Mastodon needs a lot of resources from the get go, even with one user. Second, you’ll want to enable backups, which is 20 percent of instance cost as extra. Third, you will want more disk space than is available on a base instance. Mastodon is huge and disk space is taken up pretty quickly. With AWS you can set up autoscaling drives, DO doesn’t. So, more costs… Finally, if you want to use DO Spaces, that is a flat 5USD/mo. AWS S3 is far cheaper for what would be used in this instance, on the order of free tier or couple of cents. The OP did the set up incorrectly which is why their costs are far higher. I actually did set up AWS S3 on my DO instance and the costs are extremely low. So why am I using DO? I have credits on it, that’s all. I’ll move to AWS and probably set up Takahe at some point: https://docs.jointakahe.org/ https://docs.jointakahe.org/

invalidname 4y ago
Interesting. I'm mostly on Linode and don't run a Mastodon instance. I did the back of the envelope calculations based on numbers from google but I guess you would know better. In Linode you can get additional block storage for a relatively low cost: https://www.linode.com/pricing/#block-storage https://www.linode.com/pricing/#block-storage So a 5 or 10USD instance should be enough. I will say that S3 is very expensive not because of the upfront cost. It's because of traffic. Also cloudflare is more affordable than AWS.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Traffic will be negligible on a single user instance. It’s also possible to put cloudflare in front of it (needs extra configuration I couldn’t figure out before my patience ran out though).
  - invalidname 4y ago
    The main reason I bring up cloudflare is due to OPs discussion of cloudfront and S3. S3 is unusable and expensive without a CDN.

berns 4y ago

> Both have 5USD instances DigitalOcean no longer has a USD 5 instance, it's USD 6 now.

invalidname 4y ago
Thanks for the update. I'm shocked they raised that.
AlchemistCamp 4y ago
They increased what was provided in the old $5 a couple of times, before raising the price to $6, though. Also, there’s a new $4 entry-tier droplet that has the same CPU, the same amount of ram and the same amount of storage as my $5 droplet used to: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets The included bandwidth is only half as much (500GiB), but I suspect most people who would have gotten $5 droplets in the past will now be getting $4 ones.
- berns 4y ago
  As far as I can remember, the $5 droplet always had 1 GB of RAM. The current $4 droplet is only 0.5 GB. The AWS instance in the post, t4g.small, has 2 GB of RAM. So it's not really comparable to the $4 DO droplet.
  - AlchemistCamp 4y ago
    My $5/month droplet started at 0.5 GB and the free upgrade to 1 GB of ram wasn’t even that long ago. Perhaps the image on this link will jog your memory of the old $5/month droplet stats: https://tutorialforest.com/upgrade-digitalocean-droplet-plans/ https://tutorialforest.com/upgrade-digitalocean-droplet-plan... Also, FWIW, I’ve load tested different VPSes between AWS, Linode and DO and found that for reasons I don’t understand, AWS ones perform considerably worse than the other two platforms VPSes with identically listed stats.
wkat4242 4y ago
Try Scaleway, stardust. You can only have 2 but they are 2 euro a month. And free bandwidth. I really like them (Note: I have mentioned them several times in this thread but I have no affiliation or commercial interest - just a happy customer).

rsynnott 4y ago

Yeah, if you want to do this as cheaply as possible, you certainly don’t want to use AWS. In particular using s3 seems difficult to justify. That said I assume the author is not trying for cheapest-possible.