Hi, I’m new with self-hosting but managed to set up my own Lemmy and Mastodon instances on a VPS recently. However, I ran into an issue with disk space quite rapidly (which I had way too few, because I started with the cheapest, smallest package for my VPS).
Now I prepare a new setup, where I’ll be able to dynamically scale disk space as needed, but this can get expensive quickly. Therefor my question: How much disk space do I typically need for private (1-3 user) instances of Lemmy and Mastodon? Are there settings, where I can limit the disk space utilization (at the cost of older stored content being overwritten)?
I would be fine with needing up to like 30-40 GB, but any more than that would be getting kinda expensive …
Do you need Mastodon, or can it be something similar? Mastodon does a lot of caching. For my single-user instance I run Akkoma, which is very leight-weight and has all (even more) features Mastodon has.
By the way this is Media disk usage for my Mastodon instance, but it’s not really small ;-)
So, how much do you spend, why are you doing it, and do you get any funding or paying this or of your pocket? (just trying to understand how the fediverse works)
If this helps storage is cheap. See this for deals on high capacity drives https://shucks.top/
That will depend on usage. If you subscribe to a lot of communities that are very active the database will grow fairly fast. If your users post a ton of large files then that will grow much much faster than the database. Your instance also caches image thumbnails so that can grow somewhat fast too.
Currently sitting at 750 MB for pictrs and 500MB for postgres after a week, so you may want to plan a decent size but 30-40GB should be fine for a while to get started. Add some monitoring for when it reaches 10, 20 and 30GB and keep an eye on it.
Heya, sorry for the necropost, but would you mind sharing how you’re doing on storage these days? I’m looking at spinning up a Lemmy instance of my own and I’m curious about the storage aspect on small instances
No expert here but usualy you use an external object storage (should be configurable in lemmy via pict-rs) which should be cheaper then VPS storage ^^
Maybe have a look into it.
Will there be some sort of OS running on this VPS like Ubuntu, Debian etc.? The folder my Lemmy instance is stored in is 117 MB big. I have 1 user and follow 23 communities.
