In the spirit of continued transparency, and because I haven’t remembered to do this in a while, this is an accounting of Free Radical’s hosting costs for November 2017:

• The DigitalOcean droplet and persistent block storage (for PostgreSQL) was $22.00.
• The Amazon Web Services S3 media and backup storage cost $3.59.

The DigitalOcean CPU usage graph runs consistently at about 5%. Memory is always at about 70%, with most of it used by PostgreSQL for caching. Disk usage is at about 0% except during hourly backups. Bandwidth averages about 20Kbps except during those same offsite backups.

A couple of weeks ago, I described a month’s worth of experience with hosting Free Radical’s media on S3. This update responds to some predictions now that I have an entire calendar month under my belt.

When I was estimating Free Radical’s operating costs, I predicted that S3 storage growth would be linear. That turned out to be very much the case.

I had no idea how much it would cost to host a Mastodon instance. This is for everyone like I was who’s thinking about running their own server but wants to know what to expect.

Free Radical currently has 62 users. The numbers here are what I pay our small little instance and would certainly jump up if we grew by a factor of 100x.