Server requirements experience for a small group

[chetbaker]

Hello!

I wanted to know if some of you have any experience setting up a mastodon instance for a small group of users (10-50) server-wise.

I remember reading here a warning about the use of space and memory, but I couldn't find the exact thread.

I wonder if any of you have any experience to share in terms of minimum server requirements for a small user base.

Thanks!

[girish]

@chetbaker https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/7939/running-a-federated-mastodon-instance-will-take-up-alot-of-space-and-ram-be-prepared maybe?

[chetbaker]

@girish said in Server requirements experience for a small group:

@chetbaker https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/7939/running-a-federated-mastodon-instance-will-take-up-alot-of-space-and-ram-be-prepared maybe?

yeah, thanks! that was the one.

Although my question remains, do any of you have any experience setting up a small mastodon instance that can provide any hints in terms of resources needed?

[girish]

@chetbaker I will have to let others answer that. I don't have experience running mastodon for general use.

[subven]

For 10-50 users with Cloudron (docker setup) I would recommend a minimum of:

• quad (v)core
• 6-8GB RAM
• 150-300GB SSD RAID (depends on how good the cache purging works right now)

Costs for an instance like this vary between 6-20€ per month (Cloudron not included but you can use the Free tier anyway). If you run out of disc space, invest in an external storage rather then upgrading your server. Example configurations: Contabo CLOUD VPS S, Netcup VPS 1000 G10, Hetzner CPX31

[shanelord01]

@subven Yep. I’m running mine in a Linode 8GB 4CPU (shared). That’s about the same cost.

[itbeard]

@shanelord01
I'm also using Linode 8gb /4 CPUs (but dedicated) - for 50 members it is more than enough (you can use 4Gb / 2 CPU cores). Now we have almost 400 users and 8/4 works well.

For files we use Amazon S3 (pretty cheep)

[shanelord01]

@itbeard Why do you use Amazon S3 vs Linode Object Storage? From first glance it seems Linode is cheaper at 0.02c per GB vs AWS 0.023...

[girish]

@shanelord01 Not speaking for OP, but when we started out years ago, AWS gave us a lot of free credits (via my co-working space, which is sadly now defunkt).

[doodlemania2]

@girish you still have / making use of your Azure credits from a few years back?

[girish]

@doodlemania2 sadly no, we never got a need to use it.

[Latinosnctv]

@shanelord01 I think that wasabi is the cheapest thing on the current market, in terms of price-quality.

https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#cost-estimates

No Charges For Egress or API Requests

Wasabi’s pricing model of $.0059 per GB/mo ($5.99 per TB/month) with no additional

charges for egress or API requests means you don’t pay to access your data.

[itbeard]

@shanelord01 to be honest we did not thing about LOS. Thanks for proposal, looks like this is also good option

[robi]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/yzp1qz/mastodon_server_hardware_requirements/

This is a discussion on Reddit about what it takes to host a Mastodon instance (Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol). The requirements are quite high. One large instance with 29,000 users is hosted on this hardware:

2 AMD 5950 16c/32thread 128GB ram with nvme ssds running sidekiq jobs
1 AMD 5950 16c/32thread 128GB ram with nvme ssds running elasticsearch and redis
1 AMD 5950 16c/32thread 128GB ram with nvme ssds running Postgres DB
2 AMD 5950 16c/32thread 128GB ram with nvme ssds running PUMA (mastodon web app) and nginx (only one is currently powered on - other is being reworked
1 AMD Epyc 32c/64th 400GB ram with 10TB of nvme ssd acting as a s3 storage provider and another nginx/PUMA web front end

This is a total of 96 CPU cores! Another person with 500 users says,

"For those interested in a data point, I am running an instance with nearly 500 users. Currently running on an AWS Lightsail instance with 4GB Ram, 2 vCPU, for $20/month, and an S3 instance for media storage (1TB - nearly full) for $3/month. I am constantly monitoring resources - as the system is running well but nearly topped out.

I will likely be moving to 8GB RAM, 4 vCPU instance, and 2TB S3 in the coming weeks."

These requirements are quite high. I also recently learned that bandwidth is a continuous 1-2 Gbits/s. No wonder Mastodon is having trouble keeping up with the influx of Twitter users!