Kaity A (@supakaity)
blahaj.zone
**State of the ~~nation~~ instance** So over the last month our instances have grown substantially and while Ada and I are privileged enough to be able to cover the cost of the small instance we initially envisioned, what it has become is somewhat bigger than that. The Lemmy side of things is currently at 6,500 users and is hosting a larger meme community which involves a lot of image downloads and a fairly substantial bandwidth cost for serving those downloads. As we are hosting on AWS, we pay a premium for all the resources we use and the results of this are that the hosting this month has presented us with a surprise. Our monthly bill has jumped from about $1,000 to about $3,000 a month. (See attached image) Unfortunately while we can manage this as a once off, I can't afford to continue in this fashion, month after month, so we will have to investigate solutions to help reduce operating costs. This will involve moving services off AWS to less premium providers, and the downtime involved while these migrations take place and we retune everything. I apologize in advance for the interruption while we we rejig everything through this process. Thankyou all for understanding. Please let @ada or myself know of any issues that you notice, as glitches may occur when moving things around. $[x2 :Blobhaj_Plead_2:] (📎1)

Discussion of the current situation with the Blåhaj instances, and upcoming maintenance.

  • 𝙣𝙪𝙠𝙚@yah.lolEnglish
    27·
    1 year ago

    A few friendly recommendations that may help:

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

    • SomeRandomWords@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      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.

      The rest of your points are spot on though.

      • 𝙣𝙪𝙠𝙚@yah.lolEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        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.