Instance admins, how much does it cost you to run your instance? How much does that represent per active user?

Question triggered by the other post about instances shutting down due to costs

Summary of the answers:

lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
obviously single user instance have higher costs

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I pay around 80€ per month for the lemmy.ml server, plus a few euros for image hosting and domain. So that's around 3 cents per active user.
- that's quite low. There must be a lot of barely active users
  
  2.39K monthly active users
  4th most active instance (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/ )
  Hosts 10 of the 100 most active communities (https://lemmy.ca/post/26878531 )
  
  Why is it low? Lemmy scales very well and isn't resource intensive
  
  It's lower than every other number I've seen in this thread by far
  
  Are you sure? Check again. I didn't scroll too far, but saw $6, $35, $20, $65 and $30. All are lower.
  
  For cost per user, it's only 3 cents. A few others are around 10 cents per user, and the rest are significantly higher.
  The instances with lower total cost also have much lower activity, lemmy.ml has 2.4k active users but still only 80€ per month. Impressive.
  
  I meant the cost per user. You can't really compare total costs
  
  You can compare total better than per user at these scales.
  Lemmy needs a certain amount of performance to keep up with federation, but once you have all the images and posts and comments you don't need second versions until you scale to a size that mandates multiple machines. Which I would guess is more in the 6+ digit user range, where you start averaging requests per second not minute.
  In some sense, every lemmy user is a user of your instance via federation. You need to pay the performance for all 100k of us whether your instance has 10 or 10k of those. Local users are just a bit extra demanding on your hosting resources.
  I suspect the bias we see here with larger instances paying a bit more (50-ish instead of 10-ish) is more due to reliability and snappyness than actual performance needs too. You tend to get optional smaller-gains pricier perks you might not go for for a smaller instance.
  
  Looking at the domain name, they're in Mali. Things must be cheap out there.
  
  They don’t live in Mali, they chose the TLD for its acronym’s meaning
  
  ML became an echo chamber and many have fled.
  
  I have heard it is ban heavy, but it is still quite active in the memes and the Linux communities, and I enjoy both.
  
  If you are interested, there is !linux@programming.dev and !opensource@programming.dev for linux and open source communities which are not on .ml nor .world
  
  Thanks! I like programming.dev and will participate in those more now (however I don't have a problem with Linux @lemmy.ml. I believe the ban heaviness of lemmy.ml is politically motivated, but that doesn't effect Linux content much.
  
  Until you mention that you don't mind select proprietary packages or drivers.
  
  They banned for that?? 😳
  
  Naw. I'm just stretching the thought.
  Thought process was not FOSS = not communal = capitalism.
  
  I get what's wrong with .ml. Whats wrond with .world?
  
  We have a detailed post on !fedigrow@lemm.ee : https://lemmy.world/post/14728407?scrollToComments=true
  
  An echo chamber that if you say something they don't want to hear, you know, like the truth, you catch a ban.
  
  I'm a truth seeker! And I'll kiss ANYONE to find the truth! You....your dad.....hey, where's dad at? I'll even kiss you! Maybe in 20-30 years when you look a bit more like your dad. Where is your dad anyways???
- Thank you!

98 comments