I'm debating reviving my official pixelfed hosting service idea, it's not a regular host service though!
Rather you'd bring a S3, Hetzner, Linode, DigitalOcean API key to our service
We would provision or otherwise manage (1-click updates, automated backups) your instance while allowing you to maintain total control over ownership of the underlying server and data
I'm thinking $5-20 a month for this, and it would allow admins a new level of peace of mind while maintaining total control
@dansup I maintain many personal servers (Mastodon, email server, Bluesky PDS, DNS, VPN, WordPress, Nextcloud, Peertube) and several more!, that I'd welcome having a Pixelfed instance that someone else would maintain for me. I'm just out of spare time.
I've thought of setting up a Pixelfed instance, but just haven't had the weekend time to do it.
@dansup I really like this idea. I've been a longtime Flickr user and have invested a lot of time pushing my photos to there, but it hasn't kept up with the times and has gone through a whole series of corporate acquisitions and pricing changes such that I no long upload photos there. It's a dead archive for me.
I love the idea of small "sovereign" hosting where I'm not going to get jerked around by the whims of the corporate world.
@dansup why not both? Fully hosted instances appeal to a different crowd vs the ones who are concerned about total data sovereignty and know how to spin up a VPS or compute instance and administer it.
That said, I would think your idea is more appealing to the segment of people who use the Fediverse in general. I'd like to suggest being able to set everything up with just SFTP access or some kind of API baked into the app + license key (similar to how many WordPress plugins do it).
@dansup It's not a bad idea, but first we should see if there are people interested, even think about the possible hosting plans (disk space, how many accounts can be created, to give some examples).
@itbeard It would depend on your budget, since you'd be bringing an API key for the hosting provider, we could provision the smallest compatible server and transition to a larger server if you need more capacity.
I'm in the unique position of being able to optimize performance for this in a way that few (likely no other) providers could match, meaning you could run a bigger server for cheaper than any other provider
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