Yes it could be done cheaper, if they did more work themselves. The masto.host service they're using is basically Mastodon as a service - aka they're paying someone to host (and manage) a Mastodon instance.
All in all fair value for the money IMO.
Unless I'm missing something huge, how is $1900/mo for 96GB of database and 700GB of disk storage remotely a fair value? AWS on-demand prices are significantly more affordable than that.
And this is all to support a grand total of 50,000 users? What in the world? Is Mastodon just the most inefficiently written software ever or something?
I feel like it's a bargain social media, both in feature-set and cost.
(I don't understand the server cost breakdown either, and I don't pretend do. Just doing an empirical comparison).
Not trying to be a smart arse - it’s just that the obvious pick (Twitter) has been aiming for revenue from the beginning and haven’t really delivered.
>has been aiming for revenue from the beginning and haven’t really delivered.
In 2021 twitter had 5.08 billion dollars of revenue. Their ad revenue divided by DAU was about $20. No mastodon instance is close to getting $20 per active user per year.
The Fosstodon admins run the moderation side, but masto.host (their service provider) is paid to keep the lights on.
I'm not saying they couldn't find a less expensive solution with AWS or Azure, but they need a solution now. They don't have the time to learn a new solution, design the system, and then implement a new backend while people are swarming to their instance. Migrating to another solution (even the above "box") means significant downtime for 50,000 people.
Yes, it's notoriously bad.
It doesn't actually list where and how the service itself is hosted, it just says "Fosstodon hosting" and the amount. I'm looking to understand what hardware is being used and where it's hosted.
>> "The data centers used for Masto.host are from OVH and are located in France."
So probably whatever OVH offers.
That'd be more helpful if it narrowed it down a bit more.
OVH offers ranges from 8 USD/month for a virtual CPU core in public cloud to like 1500 USD/month dedicated instances with 24 dedicated cores.
~2000 USD seems slightly expensive for what they are doing, to be honest. ~900 USD would give you a 32 cores (AMD EPYC 7502P), 1TB RAM and ~15.36TB storage over at Hetzner, just a single instance. Double that and seems they would be covered for quite a while, and it comes just under 2000 USD.