I'm seeing a bunch of posts today about how hosting a mastodon admin doesn't cost a lot of money, and first I want to say that this is true; you can run an instance on $10-20/mo entirely reasonably.
But I don't want anyone to forget that there is a labor cost in running and maintaining an instance. It's not just pushing a button and feeding in some money, it's also monitoring your server and keeping it secure and handling reports and doing upgrades and all fo that.
These are not unique to mastodon, however. These are costs of running a social media website at all - fediverse or otherwise.
You're running and managing a service. Other people will rely on you to keep that service up and running. That's a much higher cost than the dollars involved.
@InspectorCaracal priceless != free
@InspectorCaracal Don't forget backups!
@foozmeat NEVER FORGET BACKUPS
I totally keep forgetting to make copies of my backups 😓 *goes to do that*
@InspectorCaracal I definitely recommend rsync.net for offiste backups. It's not terribly expensive, they're using ZFS for storage, and you can literally rsync your data to them. Plus free snapshots.
@foozmeat I... don't need that, my offsite backups are here at my house, but thank you. >.>
@InspectorCaracal sorry, i just get so excited about backups 🙃
@foozmeat *laughs* That's okay! It's a good thing to be enthusiastic about.
@InspectorCaracal pretty sure you can get all that for free (well, not reports...) with Hugo's mastohost thing
@nightpool I don't think that quite counts as running your own instance, but it's a good point.
#mastoadmin
A larger instance doesn't just cost a little bit more money, it also requires far more labor hours to maintain.
Running a mastodon instance means things like, getting online in the morning and discovering that a stupid clock error on your server's machine took down your instance several hours ago while you were asleep, or coming back from dinner to discover that your instance was flooded and crashed by a bunch of celeb-fandom teenagers...