That's crazy is there a breakdown of the bandwidth? Like is it federation, images or ddos using so much bandwidth?

I know you are looking/found a solution but if the main culprit is images would it be possible to offload it to a few servers? I feel like running multiple image server instances would be cheaper for bandwidth. Oracle cloud offers 10tb outbound a month for free per region/month on the free teir. Or is an unmetered host viable? From my understanding Lemmy is pretty light in terms of CPU/memory or does that fall apart at scale?

If you don't mind and it's not too much trouble would you be willing to share stuff like load average/disk use?

Edit I looked this over again. Not an endorsement for giving oracle or Larry Ellison money, they are awful. I was just was trying to say the free stuff is generous. You can use 40tb outbound without paying on the free resources. As always aggressive support for you Ada! Thanks for the transparency in your community!