For those self-hosting a lemmy instance, what hardware are you using? I am currently using a small Hetzner VPS. It has 2 vCPU, 2GB RAM and 40GB SSD storage. My instance is currently just in testing with me as the only user, but I plan to use it for close friends or family that may want to try this out, but might not want to sign up for a different instance. My CPU and RAM usage is great so far. My only concern is how large the storage will balloon to over time. I’ve been up for ~20 hours and it’s grown to 1.5G total volume since.
From what I’ve heard (take this with a huge grain of salt) is that the posts themselves shouldn’t take up much of your storage. The biggest thing that could take up your storage are images, but they are only stored on the instances where the community in which they were posted in is.
It’s likely the Docker images, and maybe the Docker build cache if they built from source instead of using the Docker Hub image.
I’ve been up for about a day longer than OP, and my Lemmy data is still under 800MB. OP either included non Lemmy data in that math, or is subscribed to way more communities than me. My storage usage has been growing much faster today with all the extra activity, but I won’t have to worry about storage space for about a month even at this rate.
And that’s assuming Lemmy doesn’t automatically prune old data. I’m not sure if it does or not. But if it doesn’t, I imagine I’ll see posts in about 2-3 weeks talking about Lemmy’s storage needs and how to manage it as an instance admin.
EDIT: Turns out ~90% of my Lemmy data is just for debugging and not needed:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3103#issuecomment-1631643416
It would be cool to hear back from you guys hosting in about a week or so, so see if it’ll just grow linearly, or if slows down at some point.
I used the ansible route to get going. I am subbed to ~150 communities currently. Some of those won’t stay, but for now I am subbing to almost anything to see how that affects disk usage. I am interested to see how, or if, it levels off over time and what a week or two out looks like. I expect by then we will all have many more tips for each other as we trial and error our way through.
Here’s my current usage:
It’s probably from the instance finding other instances and communities and saving them locally. But I don’t know too much about how it actually works so I could be wrong. I also heard that they are only stored locally if someone on the instance subscribes to a community, so if that is the case my theory wouldn’t make sense.
Here’s my use: https://thesimplecorner.org/comment/30599
Using Oracles “Always free” instances.
4 vCPU (ARMv8, not sure about the speed) 24 GB RAM 200 GB Flash storage
4vcpu (Ryzen), 8GB RAM, 256gb disk (which will be expanded when it gets to like 60% full). Not too worried about storage unless I get a bunch of image-happy users, text all comes in as json and goes straight to Postgres so it’s not a concern.
How many users do you have? Not starting a server any time soon, just curious. A you seem to have one of the bigger ones in this thread and are using them for privately. Are you public?
I am going to host an instance as well and I am worried about disk space…
This server you are using is from an VPS provider? how much they cost?
I’ve got a baremetal server with OVH running VMware, so it’s just a VM that I manage. I’m paying more for it than I’d like, but it’s running far more than just Lemmy. If I wind up ditching it in the future, it’s just a quick vMotion off to another machine + DNS updates.
Here’s a current output of my storage about a week into hosting the instance. It’s growing slower than I expected, and I do have plans to move volumes/pictrs up to an s3 bucket whenever I start running low on local storage.
[jon@lemmy lemmy]# du -sh volumes/*
2.5G volumes/pictrs
2.2G volumes/postgres
I would recommend locking down SSH on your Lemmy server, I have mine restricted to allow logins from VPN only. Otherwise you’ll get probed 24/7 with a public server.
I selfhost on my own homeserver. At the moment, I’ve spared it 2 cores, 1GB of RAM and 32GB of NVMe storage mirrored.
1 vCPU, 1GB Ram, 50GB storage using the smallest x86_64 compute instances on Oracle Cloud. Qualifies for always free which is nice while I’m simply testing out a personal server. It’s working just fine within those constraints. For now, at least.
Like you, I’m worried about storage. I would like to run it from home, but I live in the woods and my internet isn’t reliable enough.
