So I was reading this article by @micah about hosting Mastodon on AWS and the related costs.
Before anything else, I think he could do well investigating the use of Akkoma instead of Mastodon if cost is important.
In any case, I found the article pretty much confirming my default assumption that AWS is a money sink. It's also a bit of a trap since it's easy to build your system specifically for AWS and then you'll have some real problems when you want to move away from it because of costs.
Obviously the author knows about how to do an effective deployment on AWS since he works for Amazon, but I wonder how easy it is to accidentally increase costs by an order of magnitude because of simple mistakes. AWS is very complex, and when I just wanted to play around with the free tier some years back I got a 100 dollar bill because I had clicked the wrong button.
https://www.micahwalter.com/how-much-ive-spent-so-far-running-my-own-mastodon-server-on-aws/
@modrobert @micah absolutely. I don't think using AWS to host a Mastodon instance is a great idea.
If you want to use AWS for this purpose, you'll probably be better off building a system that is tightly integrated with AWS functionality, such as what they refer to as "serverless". The drawback is of course that you're not going to be able to easily move off of AWS.
It also means you have to build a Fediverse application, which may not be the easiest thing. I'd be interested to learn about the architecture of such solution though.