Woah, a public SF Bay Area Mastodon server is $1000 a month to operate.
@ev I'm gonna set one up next week for invite-only accounts. On GCP it's $25 for a low end VM in their compute platform. I don't know the additional costs but I still need to set up
* A Static IP address
* Object storage for images and video (S3 type thing)
* Outgoing emails for password resets and user notifications (??? Why is email hard again?)
Then there's the cost of a relational database, which is 4x the cost of a server if Google manages it.
Add a load balancer in front of the VM for a future time when a single low-end VM stops serving requests...
You can probably see where I'm going with this.
@lazzarello how much work is it to run your own? Are there like, chores you have to do?