Over time, Lemmy instances are going to keep aquiring more, and more data. Even if, in the best case, they are not caching content and they are just storing the data posted to communities local to the server, there will still be a virtually limitless growth in server storage requirements. Eventually, it may get to a point where it is no longer economically feesible to host all of the infrastructure to keep expanding the server’s storage. What happens at this point? Will servers begin to periodically purge old content? I have concerns that there will be a permanent horizon (as Lemmy becomes more popular, the rate of growth in storage requirements will also increase, thereby reducing the distance to this horizon) over which old – and still very useful – data will cease to exist. Is there any plan to archive this old data?
Just FYI, you could save about $5 a month and get 2x the performance if you moved that to a VPS not on AWS. $11 a month for t2.micro, especially if it’s locking up, is basically you being scammed if I’m being honest 😅
AWS isn’t really designed for long running tasks like this unless you get a long term commitment discount. It’s intended for enterprises and priced that way. For a hobbyist like you, I’d definitely recommend Vultr or something.
Also, be careful about those bandwidth costs. Most of the time it’s never free to serve data out like that. You may not be using a load balancer, but double check those bandwidth costs, I remember something about paying for bandwidth I didn’t expect.
Definitely consider moving to a $5 or $10 instance on Vultr, they have block storage too. You could either save money, or spend the same for 3-4x the performance.
Yeah it’s likely that I’ll move this eventually. This instance was only setup so I had a test environment to learn AWS.