 Mastohost @mastohost is taking on new accounts again. You can get your own Mastodon server for $6 a month! The great thing about it is they take care of the software, you do not need to be technical to run a server. Mastohost is where sauropods.win is hosted, and I can recommend them. Support is top-notch, and it's all been smooth sailing. 42 comments
@john @mastohost Honestly, I'm tempted. I've even looked into the possibility of integrating my existing websites with the Fediverse but it doesn't seem possible. Some of my sites run on Wordpress, so maybe there's a plugin that allows people to comment on blog posts from a Fediverse account, but I haven't found one. I hadn't even heard of Mastodon and the Fediverse before last November so I'm still getting a handle on how it all works. @AdamStuartSmith @mastohost There is a plugin for Wordpress, but it's still in beta: https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ The keyword to look for is ActivityPub, which is the protocol. @john Thanks. I have a question. Can you, in principle, upload other files and software on the domain sauropods.win while it's running Mastodon? Like, for example, could you host a Wordpress blog at, say, sauropods.win/blog?  @AdamStuartSmith @john you might try the ActivityPub plugin. It federates your posts as @user@domain. I've gotten that far anyway, there's some fiddly bits with commenting, which may be my theme, maybe not. I keep putting off research @olavf @john ActivityPub also integrates with another plugin, 'Friends': https://wordpress.org/plugins/friends/ This allows you "To follow people on Mastodon or similar platforms using your own WordPress, you can use the Friends Plugin for WordPress which uses this plugin to receive posts and display them on your own WordPress, thus making your own WordPress a Fediverse instance of its own." I'm testing this out now... @AdamStuartSmith @john I think that one is WordPress to WordPress, but I should fiddle with it some to see if there's other functionality in it. @olavf @john The Friends plugin definitely integrates with Mastodon when used alongside the ActivityPub plugin β I've been toying around with it. I've even 'liked' Mastodon posts from my WordPress, but it still doesn't allow replies to Mastodon posts, and there are other significant limitations. However, the devs are aware of the limitations and working on it. @john @theRealKanuk I agree. I'm happy running a few Minecraft servers, but the laws around social network hosting (in the UK for me) are a complication that I don't have the brain bandwidth to handle! Fab that others do & are proactively adding to the Fediverse. @theRealKanuk @mastohost yeah, but I donβt think this is a real problem if you invite your own crowd. @john @theRealKanuk @mastohost exactly what I was thinking. Like for family or other small groups. @sproid @theRealKanuk @john @mastohost I'm thinking more about introducing them to Mastodon or other fediverse apps, ease the learning resistance, and give them alternatives to the popular social networks like Facebook. Specially because I deleted mine years ago. It could also be used by small organizations or programs as opposed to use Facebook for anything. @john @mastohost Masto.host is fantastic. I host iaccessibility.social there, and I am about to set up a new instance there as well. @edaross Secondly, being able to invite people I know to a place I can be absolutely sure of is pretty nice, and I think really helped get a lot of people over here. And finally being able to set the moderation and federation policies is good. Even some of the well-known instances (that many people I know have joined) have made some federation decisions I would not want to live with. @john @mastohost gratefuldread.masto.host is here as well, and we so far are very happy with @mastohost.   @john @mastohost probably silly question, but if you wanted to host two domains, can that be done on one plan or would it need to be two?   @john @mastohost is where https://toot.works is hosted and I can recommend them as well. @john @mastohost realistic question is how many people can you even host on $6/mo, storage, etc? @husbandpanda It depends on multiple factors. I have people on the $6/month plan with having several dozens of active users. I have people on the Galaxy plan with a single user. If you follow or are followed by thousands and thousands of remote user then the $6/month plan will not work. If you have a group of friends that almost don't follow or are followed by anyone remote, you can probably have a couple dozen without a problem. Again, it depends on the users you are hosting. @mastohost I can understand that in general, but to avoid oversimplifying and delve a little - the server capacity limitation sits within what? Storage? I/O? CPU? Memory? What gets taxed with (dozens of active users) vs (tons of cross server follows)? @husbandpanda It's hard to say. Per hour, how many posts will the active users make? How many of those posts will include media attachments? How many of those attachments are videos? How many interactions (boosts, favs, replies) will the users make? The answer to each of those questions will have a different impact in terms of CPU/IO/RAM etc. @mastohost so basically $6 may or may not fit whatever and nobody's #monitoring and hopefully things are fine? lol. Sounds like a long term risk. As a monitoring engineer by profession I would hope people are monitoring things on some level if it's their instances. Not to criticize but just in general for your own sanity. I get that social media is what it is and people do whatever but it shouldn't be impossible to quantify tbh. Maybe I need to make this a Rust project I do. @husbandpanda @mastohost *weeps in observability at the idea that you just need to ship metrics* @markdennehy @mastohost right now it sounds like there is literally 0 though, so we can't even figure out what might need to be observed. Obviously qualitative analysis of what metrics can be found is kinda key but.... @husbandpanda @mastohost I mean, that approach is valid for the scientific study of previously unknown things, or sherlock holmes investigating something, but it's not what you should do in this context. Someone wrote the parts involved, someone knows how they string together, someone knows where the bottlenecks are (the .ie instance got tuned when Irish twitter first decamped so the knowledge exists). That means we have a rough system model and can identify the important things to monitor. @husbandpanda @mastohost Find the admins who've had to do performance tuning, ask them what they looked at, what they thought the important parameters were, instrument those by default. Since there are lots of similar mastodon instances, you'd be doing a favour to a lot of new admins because it'd be widely applicable. @husbandpanda As far as I know, nobody has been able to determine CPU/RAM/IO usage needs based on the number of active users. It's pretty much the same as you being able to determine the CPU/RAM/IO of a WordPress blog, based on the number of authors. I don't think one can determine that. @mastohost @husbandpanda I think that sounds more like provisioning and yeah, that's way harder because you'd have to both know how many users and what they're going to be doing. The stuff the .ie instance went through seemed more like people tuning stuff not based on users but on queue lengths and other internals, after the users had all landed and the strain had started breaking stuff. @mastohost @husbandpanda Still, it'd give you a list of what bits broke, and what bits you shored up. That's a pretty good model.  @john @mastohost Can you choose the instance software/fork and stuff like that? @luana No, only Mastodon main release is available and no changes to the Mastodon code are possible. |
Gregory's Server
@john @mastohost and out of curiosity (being in the IT business), do the instances get offline during maintenance schedules or are they fully redundant ?