Hi everybody! I rent a vps with 6 cores, 16 GB ram and 100 GB nvme to run fediverse instances (mastodon, lemmy, matrix, peertube) and a couple related services (nginx proxy manager, nodebb forum, wiki.js, uptime kuma, portainer, tig-stack).
The why
Over the past month they have been running. It has been some work to set them up but since then they run pretty flawlessly. My main goal was to find out how much hardware I really need to run private instances (just me or maybe a handful of friends).
Here are the stats:
Disclaimer: I checked and all services federate correctly.
Resource usage
From my point of view, the 6 cores are totally overkill. A two core would probably suffice. Of the 16 GB of ram I currently need 4. So 8 should suffice. The 100 GB nvme drive is barely handling it (66% full) and thats without backups (they get pulled immediately and then deleted) and with a 48 hour media delete cycle on mastodon (which currently is the largest folder I have).
Individual Space usage (nvme)
- 8.0K heimdall
- 2.0G lemmy
- 7.1G mastodon
- 5.2G matrix
- 123M nodebb
- 236M npm
- 3.5G peertube
- 12K pgadmin
- 8.0K portainer
- 376K tig-stack
- 8.0K uptime-kuma
- 8.0K watchtower
- 12K wiki.js
- 3.6G wordpress
So while I use lemmy the most, mastodon uses far more disk space, matrix also uses more than lemmy although I’m in like 20 chats and my friends don’t use matrix except to chat with one another. I have subscribed to maybe 50 communities on lemmy.
Since the graphs in the screenshots lack legends, I’ll explain the spikes.
Container CPU usage
- red spike: lemmy postgres
- lightblue: mastodon sidekiq
- yellow: telegraf
- dark-blue: lemmy ui
Container Ram usage
- red line: peertube
- light-blue: mastodon sidekiq
- dark-red: lemmy postgres
- pink: mastodon postgres
Summary
So far I didn’t actively try to get the needed resources down except mastodon since I didnt want it to derail my experiment.
Mastodon seems to have the worst data on drive footprint, Peertube seems like a constant ram hog and lemmy spikes in the cpu all the time. So they all have their positives and negatives but nothing major. If you have 2 cores, at least 6 GB of ram and probably 250 GB of disk space to spare you should be good.
I’ll work on making the compose files and config files publicly available but right now I’m not there. If you need help spinning up an instance, please let me know. I can send you individual files if needed.
Have a good one! :)
Thank you for sharing that. Personally, I am unlikely to start my own hosting, but hopefully it helps others to make the fediverse stronger
I’ve been wanting to, but I’m lazy and have adhd. I should easily have the hardware requirements strewn around the house though to slap something together should my focus travel that road.
It’s nice to know your options.
made me snort.
Also, thanks OP for this post, this is some great quality dense information useful stuff right here.
Thank you for your feedback. Thats precisely my intention with this post. I‘d like hosting your own instance to be as easy as „come up with name, buy domain name, run script, done“. Lot of work until that day but it would make the fediverse infonitely larger imo.
I’d like to spin up a Matrix instance for me and my friends on my NAS, but like you said it’s currently more involved than just getting a domain and running a compose. The space is evolving fast though and experiments like these help a lot
Sounds like a great idea. There are companies that host servers like these. Could be a nice stepping stone. Away from big tech but not quite self reliant. Biggest problem is always data loss which is less of a problem if someone gets paid for hosting.