this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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how much does running a mastodon instance of 1000 users costs? Disabling Images and allowing only text is one of my condition. So if I do that, will that change cost? I am thinking of a VPS so that i can have greater control over instance functionality

How much Storage and RAM will be required roughly?

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[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Storage costs should be pretty low for an instance very few would want to use.

[–] sartaj@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (7 children)

suppose I kidnap 1000 people and force them to use mastodon without images, how much will it cost then? jk

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (6 children)

In all seriousness, we can't really give a cost estimate because you haven't given us your hosting scenario. Are you hosting on your own hardware, on a VPS, or using a provider that specializes in hosting Mastodon servers?

[–] sartaj@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I am thinking of a VPS so that i can have greater control over instance functionality

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

https://paulstamatiou.com/hosting-your-own-mastodon-server#choose-how-youd-like-to-host

Digital Ocean is used as an example because they have a quick setup Mastodon option. It looks like $14/mo minimum if you're going to run Elastisearch. Without that tool in memory you might get away with 1GB of memory which is $7/mo. But the author also notes that with Elastisearch his VPS uses about 2GB of ram so he's actually running the 4GB $21/mo plan.

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Even without images, you'll still need quite a bit of space. I'm not sure 50GB would cut it for 1000 semi-active users. Also you'll need to pay for the domain name.

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

@sartaj@lemmy.world important information above.

[–] sartaj@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

He also explains how to offload storage to another service for $5 a month if you want to add images back in.

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