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 …
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.
My kbin instance’s data (text data, that is) probably takes up less than 8 GB right now, and I’ve had it running about two weeks. Media storage (which I do through S3) is around 5 GB so far. Kbin does do media mirroring different than Lemmy though (I think), so YMMV. I think Lemmy mostly links to the original instance’s media object as the source.
The main thing I found eating storage on my server was a lot of old Docker images (and volumes) from me trying to get everything up and running. If you are using Docker you could try doing a docker system prune --all to get rid of unused images/build caches (anything that isn’t running currently).
I have my lemmy instance currently using about 2 GB space, I’m going to set up Mastadon this weekend I hope. There are cheap smaller dedicated servers from kimsufi for like $10 with 1/2 TB HDD.
Also Hetzner cloud has compute and disk separated, so you can scale one or the other.
I’ve got a 500GBSSD box from Hetzner, but I’m also hosting other things there and dropped VMs from Linode I had previously and consolidated there.
You could use object storage, like s3 or wasabi, for lemmy picture/media storage, if that’s eating up most space. “cloud” providers are bit bananas when you need more disk, at one point its cheaper to go down a dedicated route. Depends on your budget…
Edit: Others might chime in with a better answer, at the moment bot sure what your budget is, so its bit of assumptions from my side.
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
