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

submitted 1 month 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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[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 10 points 1 month ago

I already had a server running docker, so throwing a few more containers in was trivial. There's a docker-compose.yml published in the lemmy repo.

Since my server was already running and had free space, it was literally free, but if you're starting from scratch there's more to consider.

I've been self-hosting for over a year now, and the storage does add up. The postgres DB is 11GB, and pictrs service is getting bigger at 29GB. Between all the different services, it can eat up a decent bit of CPU. My (admittedly 10 year old CPU) sits at a load average of 1.9, so you'll probably want 3 or 4 cores minimum. And based on my stats, 4GB of ram should be just enough to keep everything loaded.