I used to work for Akamai for quite a while, so I’ve got a lot of experience in the CDN sphere. Let me know if you’d like guidance or assistance in coming up with cheaper solutions for handling the heavy lifting of your CDN needs, especially for highly-cachable content.
That’s crazy is there a breakdown of the bandwidth? Like is it federation, images or ddos using so much bandwidth?
I know you are looking/found a solution but if the main culprit is images would it be possible to offload it to a few servers? I feel like running multiple image server instances would be cheaper for bandwidth. Oracle cloud offers 10tb outbound a month for free per region/month on the free teir. Or is an unmetered host viable? From my understanding Lemmy is pretty light in terms of CPU/memory or does that fall apart at scale?
If you don’t mind and it’s not too much trouble would you be willing to share stuff like load average/disk use?
Edit I looked this over again. Not an endorsement for giving oracle or Larry Ellison money, they are awful. I was just was trying to say the free stuff is generous. You can use 40tb outbound without paying on the free resources. As always aggressive support for you Ada! Thanks for the transparency in your community!
I love that people in the comments here are like “have you tried” and “maybe we could”…as if I expected a server full of trans folks to NOT have a bunch of techie people on it :)
Most people aren’t running on AWS, and once we move off of it, our costs will come way down. We’re just seeing the reality of a tiny instance for a few people that grew rapidly in a way we didn’t see coming. We didn’t implement things initially with this scale in mind :)
Out of curiosity, what are most people using currently? I’ve been really interested in getting involved with the tech behind Lemmy and how to improve it for instance admins.
It definitely seems like the instances that restrict image hosting are doing a lot better in terms of keeping costs manageable so far. Glad to see there’s a plan, though, and no worries about downtime.
Just set up a monthly recurring donation to do my part. This isn’t one of my main instances (this is just a backup moderator alt account) but some of my fave communities are here and the instance ethos is definitely something worth supporting!
Maybe a more prominent placement of the donation site might make sense? i am running a small community on this instance and ofc want to help pay for the costs. this thread was the first time saw that donating was even an option.
I love the work you passionate people do on the fediverse. but i also think its just fair to get some compensation for your time and effort.
Remove the AWS load balancer. Your web application isn’t horizontally scaled so you don’t need that extra cost. Obviously you’ll still have to pay for bandwidth moving all those images but you remove the ELB hourly usage cost from the equation. If you’re using it for a reverse proxy, simply install a nginx container on the lemmy box. If really want a load balancer, you’ll save money by hosting haproxy on a regular server.
Get off Amazon RDS. You’ll save money by hosting your database on a regular server than using RDS. You’re moving from a fully managed solution to one you have to manage your own. This means managing your own backups and replication if you want HA failover.
Switch to object storage for pictrs. The cost is much lower.
However, you’re right that Amazon prices are high and you’ll likely find cheaper alternatives elsewhere.
I’m not sure I agree with moving from managed to unmanaged for RDS, unless you’re very familiar with databases and keeping them online, RDS (and other managed DB providers) are honestly one of the places I recommend spending more on.
Oh yeah, I agree it’s not the right choice for everyone. There’s a whole lot that can go wrong self managing DBs. Also, you’re losing out on availability as RDS gives you two availability zones for redundancy. It’s a trade off I think based on your experience, budget, and uptime requirements. Just spit balling, but I believe it would be something like a 20% cost reduction for the db hosting.
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