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Is it fairly cheap to host your own personal, single-user Lemmy instance? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by Moc@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Let's say I decided that instead of blogging, I wanted to host my own Lemmy instance that contained a maximum of one (1) user– me, but allowing other users to subscribe.

To show what I'm talking about, look at how kaidomac uses Reddit as his own personal microblog, which people subscribe to.

What is the cheapest way to do this?

My mental model of Lemmy is that if I were to do this, the instance would still be caching information from other instances. This would– at least in my mine– add up in costs.

I'm a software engineer, so feel free to use technical jargon.

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[–] Dirk@lemmy.ml 57 points 2 months ago (24 children)

Selfhosting is basically free. You already have an unmetered Internet connection, and sourcing some hardware to run Lemmy would also be super easy.

The “problem” is that setting Lemmy up is quite annoying and complex and involves multiple docker containers and volumes and networks. There are various installation scripts but it is still a complete mess.

It would also result in a metric shit-ton of traffic and data storage.

[–] myersguy@lemmy.simpl.website 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It would also result in a metric shit-ton of traffic and data storage.

Really depends how many instances they want to federate with. I run a single user instance for all of my personal Lemmy use. Looks like it is using 20Gb of bandwidth per week, and the VM it runs on only has 32Gb of storage (and it runs other services, too)

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Did you follow these instructions?:

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html

If so, did you find they “just worked” or was there troubleshooting involved?

I’m interested in self-hosting but very busy lately with little time to spare for tech troubleshooting

[–] myersguy@lemmy.simpl.website 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I used the Lemmy Ansible method to deploy. At the time that I first installed it, it was the recommended method vs a docker compose. It is a little bit of setup, but is pretty simple to get going. Just follow the instructions and it should just work.

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you don’t mind my asking, what’s your level of IT expertise?

Have you administered servers, used ansible, etc?

[–] myersguy@lemmy.simpl.website 4 points 2 months ago

I'm a software dev with quite a lot of experience in server admin. I'm also a full time Linux user, and run a lot of services both at home and on a rented VPS. I had oddly enough never used Ansible before, but the instructions on that GitHub page should make it pretty simple.

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