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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.
That’s interesting to know the price per user is silver 50¢ per month, I wonder what other instances like beeaw, lemmy.world, etc. are at?
Either way, I hope more people donate to help keep costs manageable, especially reoccurring donations.
Also, thank you so much for the work you’ve done and continue to do with this, there’s no where else in the fediverse I’d rather be than here!
Most people aren’t running on AWS, and once we move off of it, our costs will come way down. We’re just seeing the reality of a tiny instance for a few people that grew rapidly in a way we didn’t see coming. We didn’t implement things initially with this scale in mind :)
Out of curiosity, what are most people using currently? I’ve been really interested in getting involved with the tech behind Lemmy and how to improve it for instance admins.