this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Hey. I really like the idea of the fediverse and Lemmy and would want to know as a beginner/not so experienced regarding selfhosting what would be the best way to get started? I saw there are vps options, but don't know of I'm looking in the right direction.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Get a cheap linux VPS. My host provides 4 CPU sd and 8G for 8 eur per month which should be enough for something like 500 users.

Then just run the ansible playbook. It will do everything for you

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is this an arm instance on hetzner? I was looking for something cheaper than digitalocean, but I like their networking quality a lot.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How long have you been using Contabo? Are they reliable enough?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They're good enough for hobby projects, but don't rely on them for very critical infrastructure, unless you can setup reliable high availability yourself. Multiple times they took down my DB for hours on the weekend and were unavailable to fix until Monday.

However they're one of the best power for money available. I've been using them for something like 10 years now, but I started using them way more extensively 1 year ago when I started the AI Horde

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

These random unannounced outages are what I had heard multiple times before. While I'm under to illusion my lemmy instance is something special, I do aim for 100% uptime. Shit happens, things go down, but it appears Contabo has grown a reputation for it :( I may try hetzner at some point.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

you get what you pay for. but there's no 100% uptime. and five 9s are really expensive to setup. You can work around contabo's iinstability by smart clustering, but I don't know if lemmy supports that very well. You might need some expertise with k8s etc.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Oh, don't get me wrong - I'm under to illusion of having 100% uptime, I'm simply aiming for it :D The idea of cloud is so that hardware redundancy problems are handled by them - that's the selling point. Otherwise I can achieve random outages quite well on my own hosting stuff at home :D

I do understand what you mean, though - you get what you pay for.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Different experiences I suppose. Used Contabo to host an ansible setup of Lemmy, never had a single outage for 6 months.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's down to luck. I've had two different DB contabo server hit by outages. I once had about 8 VMs going down together. If you've managed to avoid it, great. But it's a matter of time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I have mine running on the cheapest arm Hetzner instance, working well so far

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Glad to hear that!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh, Hetzner has ARM machines now? Very nice. Guess I should finally move at least my mail server to ARM.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yes, only in ~~Frankenstein~~ Falkenstein though. Which isn't a big deal if you're EU based anyway

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Frankenstein is the name of the doctor, not the name of the monster

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

oh no, that'll teach me for using LanguageTool!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I didn't know Lemmy could run on arm architecture. Is your installation with docker?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, with the Ansible method. I tried the docker method, but it really didn't want to work for me.

If you go the Ansible way though make sure you're using a Debian 11 based OS

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Hosting on Ubuntu 22.04, worked a charm with Ansible. Docker was a mess, couldn't figure it out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Smaller lemmy instances runs great on a raspberry pi 3 I've heard.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

4 CPU sd and 8G for 8 eur per month

holy crap, that's cheap!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

thanks, in VPS, any red flag I should care for? Privacy, monitoring, etc?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Very low bandwidth caps will be a problem with fediverse.

Other than that, check your steal % once you have the VM. If it's over 20% consistently, you're being ripped off.