Server costs per November 8th 2022

Hey everyone. 👋

I am providing some insights into the costs that toot.community is making to keep servers running happily.

Our infrastructure setup consists of multiple parts, which can scale independently of each other to adapt dynamically to current demand. Dynamic (pay-per-use) means that costs could ultimately be higher or lower. Since we’re still in the first month of operations, it’s hard to tell, but I’ll let you know when the first bill comes in on this page.

Estimated costs

• $441/month for handling all traffic
• $60/month for running the database
• $65/month for storing and serving all media files
• $50/month for sending emails

This list brings the total cost of running toot.community to about $616/month.

Statistics

For this price, we can serve Mastodon to 15,491 users that signed up in the last couple of days. Together they interacted 204,333 times. This community is only 124 hours old, meaning that we’ve onboarded 124 new users each hour since starting toot.community. That’s 27 interactions each minute 🙂. It’s been a wild ride, for sure.

Despite this crazy rush of new people, we’ve managed to stay online 97.68% of the time.

49 Patrons pledged a part of their hard-earned money to our instance, totaling $190/month. Currently, this covers about 30% of operational costs. I’m very grateful for your trust! 🙏

Conclusion

In return, I pledge to you: I will do my utmost best to keep toot.community running smoothly, providing a safe place for everyone to express themselves online, and keeping your information safe.

We’re committed to the Mastodon Server Covenant too!

What’s next?

Since costs rise linear with the number of users, registrations are now closed. I want to wait with reopening until traffic decreases or we get some financial wiggle room to maneuver again. My priority, before growth, is to ensure a pleasant user experience for the people already in this community.

Thanks, and until the next time.

Written by @jorijn.