On the Fireside Fedi interview with Jerry ( the admin of Infosec.Exchange Mastodon instance ) a scary truth was suddenly revealed ( on 34:11 ): Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his pocket. Donations to the instance barely cover any of that. And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
They haven’t updated their wikis for Operating Costs or Hosting since late 2022, somewhat aligned with their blog post on handling the mass influx of users from “E-day”.
Back then this was 6 AMD 5950 16/32 with 128GB of RAM and 2x3.84TB SSDs, with one “storage provider” with an AMD epyc 32/64 with 400GB of RAM and 10TB of storage.
Their hosting provider doesn’t offer these same SKUs, but roughly equivalent could be about €200/mo for each of the former, and the beefiest high RAM option is like €800/mo, totalling €2K/mo?
Curious how much the infrastructure has grown, but I haven’t seen anything else. Even so, these costs are extremely high.