Kaity A (@supakaity)
blahaj.zone
**State of the ~~nation~~ instance** So over the last month our instances have grown substantially and while Ada and I are privileged enough to be able to cover the cost of the small instance we initially envisioned, what it has become is somewhat bigger than that. The Lemmy side of things is currently at 6,500 users and is hosting a larger meme community which involves a lot of image downloads and a fairly substantial bandwidth cost for serving those downloads. As we are hosting on AWS, we pay a premium for all the resources we use and the results of this are that the hosting this month has presented us with a surprise. Our monthly bill has jumped from about $1,000 to about $3,000 a month. (See attached image) Unfortunately while we can manage this as a once off, I can't afford to continue in this fashion, month after month, so we will have to investigate solutions to help reduce operating costs. This will involve moving services off AWS to less premium providers, and the downtime involved while these migrations take place and we retune everything. I apologize in advance for the interruption while we we rejig everything through this process. Thankyou all for understanding. Please let @ada or myself know of any issues that you notice, as glitches may occur when moving things around. $[x2 :Blobhaj_Plead_2:] (📎1)

Discussion of the current situation with the Blåhaj instances, and upcoming maintenance.

  • Mewtwo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    11·
    11 months ago

    Can you remove image uploading as an option? How about using a third party website for users to upload their image to then link to that to offset costs.

    • SamPond@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      6·
      11 months ago

      I was going to mention something like this in another post that was concerned about the server slowing down. I particularly only use imgchest for my posts, as it replaced Imgur after their nsfw ban, and don’t see why we can’t limit uploads to that or other 3rd party services like catbox, imgpile, and such.

      • valpackett@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        3·
        11 months ago

        You will have issues accessing Catbox/files on Catbox if you are connecting from the following countries or providers:

        The Australian government […] decided that Catbox was a terrorist propaganda spreading website

        the love of footy has overtaken the sensibilites of the British and Irish governments, and they have decided to implement an IP level block

        Sounds great.

      • Baut [she/her] auf.@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        From a friend I’ve heard that they can’t access it via Tor, which is kinda sad. Under governments which are threatening LGBTQ+ people some may want some kind of protection looking at queer memes.