168
What is the long-term storage plan for Lemmy instances?
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
168 points (98.8% liked)
Lemmy
11948 readers
2 users here now
Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
Currently I'm just running a single user instance on a t2.micro. I've definitely locked it up at least twice after subscribing to a big batch of external communities so it's definitely undersized if were to open it up to more users. I only have one other small service running on that instance though so Lemmy is definitely using the bulk of that capacity at least when it's got work to do.
Costs are about $11.25 a month for the instance and about $2.50 for block storage (which is oversized now that pict-rs is on S3). I'm guessing that pict-rs s3 costs will be just a few pennies a day unless I start posting a lot on my own instance, probably less than a dollar a month.
Data transfer costs for me are zero though. I'm not using a load balancer or moving things between regions so I don't expect that to change.
As for the data transfer costs, any network data originating from AWS that hits an external network (an end user or another region) typically will incur a charge. To quote their blog post:
So you won't be charged for incoming federated content, but serving content to the end user will count as traffic exiting AWS. I am not sure of your exact setup (AWS pricing is complex) but typically this is charged. This is probably negligible for a single-user instance, but I would be careful serving images from your instance to popular instances as this could incur unexpected costs.
Just FYI, you could save about $5 a month and get 2x the performance if you moved that to a VPS not on AWS. $11 a month for t2.micro, especially if it's locking up, is basically you being scammed if I'm being honest 😅
AWS isn't really designed for long running tasks like this unless you get a long term commitment discount. It's intended for enterprises and priced that way. For a hobbyist like you, I'd definitely recommend Vultr or something.
Also, be careful about those bandwidth costs. Most of the time it's never free to serve data out like that. You may not be using a load balancer, but double check those bandwidth costs, I remember something about paying for bandwidth I didn't expect.
Definitely consider moving to a $5 or $10 instance on Vultr, they have block storage too. You could either save money, or spend the same for 3-4x the performance.
Yeah it's likely that I'll move this eventually. This instance was only setup so I had a test environment to learn AWS.