3 ms·

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

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.
INTPenis 4y ago
You could improve in some places. I also use DO and first of all Mastodon itself, the web services, streaming API, can run on minimal nodes. I have almost 1000 MAU's now and only need about 600M RAM for each web service container instance. And backups, for that I use postgres-operator (yes it's kubernetes), which does S3 backups and those cost almost nothing. (I know cost can go up if I need to restore because of egress traffic) Media is also in S3, with a Cloudfront proxy. As soon as I enabled the CF proxy my S3 costs went down to 0.1 dollars basically. And finally, thank the gods for kubernetes because it allows me to dynamically scale up sidekiq when the queues are backed up. So my base cost for 1000 MAU's on DO is about 150USD/month. But it goes up if Sidekiq scales up temporarily, so it's a fluent final cost based on how many times Sidekiq had to scale up in a month. Most importantly for me is that nothing in this setup is vendor locked. S3 compatible services are plenty, cloudfront web proxy services, plenty of those out there, AWS SES for outgoing e-mails can also be replaced. And of course kubernetes with proper IaC can be deployed into any managed k8s solution.

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.

INTPenis 4y ago

You could improve in some places. I also use DO and first of all Mastodon itself, the web services, streaming API, can run on minimal nodes. I have almost 1000 MAU's now and only need about 600M RAM for each web service container instance. And backups, for that I use postgres-operator (yes it's kubernetes), which does S3 backups and those cost almost nothing. (I know cost can go up if I need to restore because of egress traffic) Media is also in S3, with a Cloudfront proxy. As soon as I enabled the CF proxy my S3 costs went down to 0.1 dollars basically. And finally, thank the gods for kubernetes because it allows me to dynamically scale up sidekiq when the queues are backed up. So my base cost for 1000 MAU's on DO is about 150USD/month. But it goes up if Sidekiq scales up temporarily, so it's a fluent final cost based on how many times Sidekiq had to scale up in a month. Most importantly for me is that nothing in this setup is vendor locked. S3 compatible services are plenty, cloudfront web proxy services, plenty of those out there, AWS SES for outgoing e-mails can also be replaced. And of course kubernetes with proper IaC can be deployed into any managed k8s solution.