We are launching KBIN fully managed service

Hey dear community, we just launched today our fully managed hosting service of KBIN

We offer to do Deployment / Security / SSL / DNS / SMTP / Monitoring / Alerts / Backups / Automated updates / Handle migrations / Fully automated but with Human support :)

We deploy each instance on a dedicated VM, and we provide full root access as well if you want to customize anything.

Pricing start at $10/month (billed hourly, no contract)
https://elest.io/open-source/kbin

FYI we have interest in Open source in general, not only Fediverse even if we also support Mastodon, Friendica, PeerTube, Gitea and now KBIN!

I would love to get some feedback from the community :)

tal, (edited )
tal avatar

It sounds to me like the bar to deploy had been discouraging some from deploying instances.. It will be interesting to see what happens with the instance count after this.

density,
density avatar

is there more than 1?

NotAPenguin,

There's a few: https://fedidb.org/software/kbin

heyfluxay,

And more that are even smaller.

NotAPenguin,

Yeah, there's more pages of instances if you open the link.

heyfluxay,

Glanced right over the link…..

NotAPenguin,

All good haha

melroy,
@melroy@kbin.melroy.org avatar

There is a next page button...

NotAPenguin,

Yes, I gave you the link to go click it if you want

melroy,
@melroy@kbin.melroy.org avatar

Yes I know. Just saying, I think there is more than a "few" instances by now 🙏😊

callyral,

yes, like the one i'm on

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

I tried to self host using the docs and docker.

Normally I would check out source, build and deploy, but the docs suggest an entirely manual deployment or build/deploy via docker compose.

The issue I hit was figuring out what had failed in the process, I would have preferred a CI guide to produce working docker images and a CD guide for deploying the docker images.

The reason I gave up is there aren't any release markers, I tried with develop and main and couldn't figure out if it was me or the branches weren't in a buildable state.

I don't expect the a release to be perfect just an indicator that a working product was created at this point.

Books,
Books avatar

I'd love to deploy my own instance of either kbin or lemmy, but a ten buck a month price tag is a bit steep (imho). I'll wait until there are better guides for hosting my own.

Sam_uk,
Sam_uk avatar

@Books that includes the server bill too.

@jbenguira @tal

Sam_uk,
Sam_uk avatar

@jbenguira Nice! I just created an instance and it was a very quick point and click job. Great work

AmidFuror,

Seems like a real user, too, although this is exactly what a bot would say!

Sam_uk,
Sam_uk avatar

@AmidFuror I am real! I did encourage elest.io to add kbin to their catalogue.

@jbenguira

garrettw87,
garrettw87 avatar

I just want to point out to anyone interested in kbin+docker stuff that OP has published their Docker image of Kbin to Docker Hub. https://hub.docker.com/r/elestio/kbin
I actually ran across this image before I saw this post.

Sam_uk,
Sam_uk avatar

@jbenguira after fixing the image thing, my main feedback is that it doesn't run that well on the single core 2Gb ram option. It does run, but pretty slowly.

The dual core 4Gb ram version seems to run reasonably well, but I haven't put it under proper load yet.

jbenguira,

Thanks for your feedback

  1. we are evaluating impact of activating nginx cache and we will add that by default in our template
  2. our image is also ARM64 compatible, so it can be a way to get more cores for less
brecht,
@brecht@social.coop avatar

@jbenguira What's the support for migrating out your data. Because this could be a great way to get a new instance going, but it would be great to have the option to e.g. move to a self-hosted fork down the line.

jbenguira,

Hey @brecht, we provide full root access and tools like VSCode in the browser, file explorer, SFTP access so you can move your files & db. We do plan to have an automated migration system later. But for now KBIN is still young

LollerCorleone,
LollerCorleone avatar

I am really happy to see this! Hope more such services come up for fediverse platforms.

bioemerl,

You guys better give some money back to the dev.

jbenguira,

It's definitely the kind of things we do! We have agreements with several open source software authors and we do give them parts of the profits. FYI we also contribute in code to some projects

NotAPenguin,

Great, hopefully this will help kbin grow :)

cjerrington,
cjerrington avatar

For that price point and management, I sure hope that helps kbin easier for others to get more instances going. Even if folks have a 1-5 user instance $10/mo is great!

Frog-Brawler, (edited )
Frog-Brawler avatar

Damn, that seems like a decent price too. Does it actually run without issues on those 2GB RAM instances though?

ZickZack,

That depends on the size of the insurance: keep in mind that, for the most part, kbin is just a list of txt files. 2gb of ram sounds like a lot less than it is since people are used to desktops that have all sorts of additional stuff running on the side which pushes up the overall system consumption

tal,
tal avatar

I think a bigger factor may be media uploads. Today, my understanding -- from hearing about a single case of a user in the UAE who couldn't access media after the UAE blocked a Lemmy instance, not from running an instance myself -- is that the instance to which they are uploaded serves them. That is, unlike with messages, media isn't propagated to other instances. I have no idea if support for media uploads is a toggleable flag or what, but if one intends to permit open signups and have users that upload a bunch of large media, it could consume that storage space. I don't know if Elestio presently supports dynamically upgrading a plan to get more storage.

tal, (edited )
tal avatar

Another interesting question that I don't know if Elestio has considered -- maybe they have, if they do managed hosting outside of this -- is the situation with content.

To give some examples of Fediverse instances -- Lemmy, not kbin, but I expect that the same will apply -- that I've seen:

  • lemmy.dbzer0.com is run by the old lead moderator of /r/piracy and at least talks about copyright-infringing content. I don't know if the instance itself actually has any.

  • lemmy.blahaj.zone serves, among other things, LGBT-related material which apparently some governments, like the UAE, object to.

  • lemmynsfw.com serves pornographic media. My understanding is that due to various laws surrounding pornography, often hosting providers will not handle commercial services that serve pornography.

  • burggit.moe serves lolicon and consentual-nonconsentual pornographic material. The former and possibly the latter may be legal issues in some countries; it sounds like Elestio operates in a number of data centers and has some constraints on where their backups go, and the country with the datacenter handling backups may have different legal constraints. Germany and the US may be okay with this, but I bet that they operate in some regions that are not.

  • I have not seen it yet, but I am sure that Nazi material and Soviet material -- well, lemmygrad.ml probably has the latter -- will show up. I'm in the US, where all this is First Amendment-protected stuff, but some countries in Europe have far-more-restrictive laws on content featuring one or the other and prohibit display of their symbols; I'm not sure how this applies to hosting services, but my guess is that the German government would take major issue with something like stormfront.org being hosted in Germany.

  • As various services like Twitter have discovered, there are a lot of countries around the world who have governments who are very enthusiastic about tamping down on protests against and forums against the government or demanding information on users who speak out about the government. I believe that the pressure point here is to payment providers. As most people operating instances probably aren't running a business and trying to target their payment providers is useless, trying to go after Elestio may be the next target.

  • Depending upon where an instance is hosted, right to be forgotten laws may apply. The US does not have such a doctrine, but the EU does.

  • The EU and the US may not take the same position on how art produced by generative AI and copyright should interact; this is in flux now. This may have major impact on where what content can be hosted.

I would be willing to wager that I have not seen the extent of content that is available on the Fediverse today in my few days on it. I would also wager that many users will start exploring what the limits are on what hosting providers will accept in various areas.

So there may be some interesting legal and ToS questions that will come up in the future.

BaldProphet,
BaldProphet avatar

If this service provider is located in the US, it won't be a legal issue thanks to Section 230.

garrettw87,
garrettw87 avatar

Sure, as long as Section 230 remains the law. There are those who want to dismantle it, unfortunately.

Sam_uk,
Sam_uk avatar

@Frog@kbin.social I'll let you know.

@jbenguira

akatsukilevi,
akatsukilevi avatar

Not gonna lie, I was expecting KBin to take a lot more RAM than this, this is cool

Sam_uk,
Sam_uk avatar

@Frog@kbin.social It does run, but not great.

The dual core 4Gb seems good so far, but I've not stress tested it. There's an instance here you could have a look at: https://fledd.it/

@jbenguira

aeternum,

nice work!

Sam_uk,
Sam_uk avatar

@jbenguira @ernest did you spot this?

ernest,
ernest avatar

Thanks, that's great. Currently, the develop branch is becoming more stable, and we are getting ready for the first release soon.

I will definitely try it later; I'm curious to see how it works ;)

ReiWasHere, (edited )
ReiWasHere avatar

off-topic, hi ernest, is there a way to contact ppl on kbin somhow? private messages?

now to my question: i see that you own a lot of magazines (mostly auto-created added), now if i create something with a similiar name on /kbin itself, am i allowed to keep it? since the one i see is on a different instance?

i did read the kbin-core/wiki/ but couldn't find anything about it. edit: if there is.. can you please quote / link to it?

:)

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