Current server costs
Published on January 23, 2024 by Saunders
Keeping things #4opens, this is a breakdown of the existing states and monthly costs for the VPS' we have online.
Please set up a regular donation to support this 20-year-old project, allowing it to stay online.
We recently shutdown our two Mastodon instances, https://activism.openworlds.info and https://campaign.openworlds.info.
They were not self-hosted, and the cost became increasingly prohibitive.
Sadly, the communities of those two instances were not self-sustaining. They were not working as intended; more shouting into the void than effective spiky/fluffy activism.
Currently, we are hosting:
- a Peertube instance at https://visionon.tv/ (currently down)
- a Forgejo instance (formerly Gitea) at https://unite.openworlds.info/
It is intended for general project management, development and documentation for the Open Media Network, the Open Governance Body and other related projects
- a wordpress instance hosting https://hamishcampbell.com
- a mail server for our and potentially related projects
The Peertube is our current heavy weight. Aside from trying to open up slowly for new content submission, it was predominantly being used to archive and pull certain content away from the #dotcons back to the #openweb.
The transcoding during migrating these videos often taxed the VPS to it's limits, hurting the general use of the instance. Further, failed transcodes had a tendency to pile up, eventually filling up the disk space and causing the Postgres database to crash. We have so far been unsuccessful in finding a neat solution to this problem.
Hosting video is non-trivial and by far the most costly aspect of our endeavours.
And this is still the case even though we actually pass most of the "buck" of delivering video content to Wasabi - another centralised "solution" we would prefer to avoid.
But for now, decentralised or fully distributed video sharing kind of sucks - and sufficient TB's of storage is expensive for normal people.
So yeah, finally to the costs (rounded up to the nearest Euro):
- Peertube
- to migrate to hopefully sufficient VPS specs (for our modest use case)
- 4 cores
- 8 GB RAM
- 160 GB Disk
~ EUR 30 /pcm
- Forgejo
- 1 core
- 4 GB RAM
- 40 GB Disk
~ EUR 10 /pcm
- WordPress
- 1 core
- 2 GB RAM
- 40 GB Disk
~ EUR 7 /pcm
- Mail server
- 1 core
- 2 GB RAM
- 40 GB Disk
~ EUR 7 /pcm
- Wasabi S3 storage
~ EUR 6 /pcm
The VPS' are currently hosted by OVH. We would like to migrate away from them for a few reasons. So these costs may actually be slightly insufficient depending on who we may find to be a more suitable host.
In a better world, we'd rent rack space and have our own servers in place at a trusted data centre.
In an ideal world we'd be able to do so locally, and more distributed.
We're not there yet ;)
Please set up a regular donation to support this 20-year-old project, allowing it to stay online.
We recently shutdown our two Mastodon instances, https://activism.openworlds.info and https://campaign.openworlds.info.
They were not self-hosted, and the cost became increasingly prohibitive.
Sadly, the communities of those two instances were not self-sustaining. They were not working as intended; more shouting into the void than effective spiky/fluffy activism.
Currently, we are hosting:
- a Peertube instance at https://visionon.tv/ (currently down)
- a Forgejo instance (formerly Gitea) at https://unite.openworlds.info/
It is intended for general project management, development and documentation for the Open Media Network, the Open Governance Body and other related projects
- a wordpress instance hosting https://hamishcampbell.com
- a mail server for our and potentially related projects
The Peertube is our current heavy weight. Aside from trying to open up slowly for new content submission, it was predominantly being used to archive and pull certain content away from the #dotcons back to the #openweb.
The transcoding during migrating these videos often taxed the VPS to it's limits, hurting the general use of the instance. Further, failed transcodes had a tendency to pile up, eventually filling up the disk space and causing the Postgres database to crash. We have so far been unsuccessful in finding a neat solution to this problem.
Hosting video is non-trivial and by far the most costly aspect of our endeavours.
And this is still the case even though we actually pass most of the "buck" of delivering video content to Wasabi - another centralised "solution" we would prefer to avoid.
But for now, decentralised or fully distributed video sharing kind of sucks - and sufficient TB's of storage is expensive for normal people.
So yeah, finally to the costs (rounded up to the nearest Euro):
- Peertube
- to migrate to hopefully sufficient VPS specs (for our modest use case)
- 4 cores
- 8 GB RAM
- 160 GB Disk
~ EUR 30 /pcm
- Forgejo
- 1 core
- 4 GB RAM
- 40 GB Disk
~ EUR 10 /pcm
- WordPress
- 1 core
- 2 GB RAM
- 40 GB Disk
~ EUR 7 /pcm
- Mail server
- 1 core
- 2 GB RAM
- 40 GB Disk
~ EUR 7 /pcm
- Wasabi S3 storage
~ EUR 6 /pcm
The VPS' are currently hosted by OVH. We would like to migrate away from them for a few reasons. So these costs may actually be slightly insufficient depending on who we may find to be a more suitable host.
In a better world, we'd rent rack space and have our own servers in place at a trusted data centre.
In an ideal world we'd be able to do so locally, and more distributed.
We're not there yet ;)