There was a big price increase a month or two ago that affected existing servers. I think this is recognizing that Hetzner just can’t acquire new servers (particularly memory) at anywhere close to what they could before. RAM prices are up about 400% in the past year and rising, and I think even server chassis and CPUs are being largely soaked up by the mesoscale datacenter builds.

Net net, this sucks. And my expectation is that Hetzner will still be the cheapest game in town by about the same percentages as before. It the costs keep going up, I think we will see the fediverse starting to struggle.

Between the absolute crush of bot registrations and the spiraling costs, I have been contemplating moving to a required donation for new accounts.

I can increase that if you like.

Hi all. It’s Jerry from the interview talking about infosec.exchange. I think it’s important to understand some apparently missing context in the discussions below. I was talking about a hypothetical future where we saw tens/hundreds of millions of active accounts on the fediverse. I don’t believe the current funding model can support that, and I also don’t think the “spin up your own host” model will work for the masses, either.

I host close to two dozen different fediverse services, from lemmy to mastodon to mbin to peertube and lots more, and all that takes some significant hardware to run at larger scales. My objective has been to provide a fast and reliable fediverse experience, and so I’ve focused more on that than on making my servers scream, and so I’ve landed on hosting the fleet on a series of Hetzner Dell servers with 10GB interfaces, and that is not cheap.

I am not sure if the “he” reference is me, but I did ask and people did step up to support the costs of running the instance.

Hey all, Jerry here (from the interview). Happy to answer any questions.