I’ve put together a toplevel breakdown of the financial costs of running a small open registration community server. I’m fortunate enough to be able to pay for the costs myself without asking for donations, but I wanted to help shed some light on how much hosting costs are for a small server like ours.
Financial breakdowns
| Server | Cost | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Main server | 32.9E | Main mastodon server |
| monitoring | 6.0$ | grafana server for metrics |
| admin | 12.0$ | legacy server for misc sites |
| mail server | 4.0$ | main inbound mail server |
| s3 storage | 7.0$ | Media storage |
Main server
This is where all of the production services are running. We run mastodon as docker containers, with postgresql running as a bare metal service.
monitoring
a small server that runs our grafana ui and collects statistics on the main server. We use this for monitoring the sidekiq queues and visualizing load on the server.
Admin server
The admin server is a legacy server kept around for convenience. It was the old home for yttrx.com before we migrated to hetzner. I can (and should) retire this server.
mail server
We use a (free) third party mailer for our outbound mail as we were getting our IP address spam-holed with google. We run this server as an inbound MX for the yttrx.com domain. All admin email is handled here.
s3 storage
files.yttrx.com is handled by cloudflare and tunnels the traffic directly to our s3 CDN. This removes the burden of having to maintain the file storage ourselves. We simply pay for the ~300GB of storage used in our bucket.