10 to 50 dollars, 400 GB, upgrade later if need be with other services, I think 4gb of ram is enough
this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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Oh no images? 4 dollars, maybe 2 with no space 2 or 4 cores and 1 or 2gb ram
Speaking of mastodon, any recommendations on lightweight & featureful Android apps for Mastodon ?? (I understand that this may not be the right post to ask, but still....)
Why do you want to run an instance for that many people? Do you have 1000 people already, or is that just a number that you decided to work with? Why would people be interested in joining an instance with less functionality than the bigger ones?
Also: does it have to be Mastodon, or would you consider other alternatives? Pleroma and GoToSocial would be a lot easier to manage.
It is number of people necessary for instance to be functional as intended. I am trying to run an instance where only people verified using legal Documents should be able to post, comment, vote. That is to increase transparency and keep spammers away. I Intend it to be a political website I will read about GoToSocial and Pleroma
I'd guess that whoever would be willing to give you copies of legal documents just to join an "exclusive" instance would also be okay with contributing a few bucks per month to pay for its costs.
To give you ballpark figures. Self-hosting will not save you much compared to that.
Software like Akkoma or GoToSocial will save you some CPU and RAM costs, but are more optimized for smaller instances.
Storage costs should be pretty low for an instance very few would want to use.
suppose I kidnap 1000 people and force them to use mastodon without images, how much will it cost then? jk
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?
I am thinking of a VPS so that i can have greater control over instance functionality
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.
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.
@sartaj@lemmy.world important information above.
Thanks!!
He also explains how to offload storage to another service for $5 a month if you want to add images back in.