Hey dear community, we just launched today our fully managed hosting of Lemmy
We offer to do Deployment / Security / DNS / SMTP / Monitoring / Alerts / Backups / Automated updates / Handle migrations / Fully automated but with Human support :)
We deploy each instance on a dedicated VM, and we provide full root access as well if you want to customize anything.
Pricing start at $10/month (billed hourly, no contract)
https://elest.io/open-source/lemmy
I would love to get some feedback from the community
That was fast…
Eh it’s pretty easy now. Setting up something like this is just a script that needs running
I’m interested in hosting my own lemmy instance on-prem with my unRAID server. BYOVM seems interesting, but not sure why I would pay for that…?
Some people prefer to pay a small amount to a third party so they can sleep better knowing that experts are taking care of maintenance for them.
Origin of Elestio: we started deploying open-source software for websites and web apps we built, many for SMB and enterprise customers. Our process was basically: spin up VM’s from a hosting provider, install the software we needed, then update it manually / when it was needed / critical, etc.
Once we hit > 100 servers/services needing updates, backups, capacity monitoring and alerting, etc. we saw that it was getting totally unmanageable… so we built what would eventually become Elestio.
Managed databases is a solved problem (AWS RDS, Aiven, Scalegrid), but what about other open-source software? Marketplaces have apps templates for one-click deployments, but once deployed you need expensive devOps to properly maintain your software.
Elestio provides enterprise-grade, fully managed services for 200+ open-source softwares. 100x cheaper than using human devOps, 10x more effective
We are helping startups & enterprises from 16 countries to deploy/secure/maintain open source softwares at scale (some customers have hundreds of managed services with us), we are saving them tons of time and money by managing that for them.
Got it, that makes sense. Cool to see.
I assume they run upgrades and backups?
This seemslike the thing I am looking for. I have no experience with servers and stuff though. Could you give me a brief overview what the basic offer would mean in terms of stuff important for lemmy, like how many users can join your instance with that option, how much can they post etc.
The smallest offer comes with 1vcpu / 2GB ram (+2GB of swap on NVME) / 20GB of disk (NVME), I would say it’s good enough for up to 50 active users. For the storage it’s possible to connect a Network volume to extend the storage up to 10TB.
Bigger plans have way more ram & cpu allowing you to scale to thousands and tens of thousands of active users.
Awesome!
While i can see a benefit in such a service … anyway, one (and a half) questions out of principle:
Are you actively participating in Lemmy or the “Fediverse” at large, meaning that you’d have a vital interest in the development of collectively-operated social networks?
Or is it more so that you jumped on the opportunity to perhaps be the first company to put an advertisement in people’s feeds, in order to make a buseness?… I may add, this is advertising a service which potentially would allow for customer lock-in, and at the same time it would allow the service provider to potentially gain power over parts of the network. Lemmy instance admins would in essence hand their keys and trustworthyness to a third party. That is concerning.
And … this is calling for a feature request: advertisement flag, including an ignore option in user settings.
I think this kind of handwringing shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how the internet works.
Everything you’ve ever pushed your eyeballs against on the internet was hosted somewhere. These days its pretty much all in the cloud.
All this team did was write a wrapper to automate the instance creation, which I just happily paid for, because even though I could have figured it out, it wasnt work several hours of my time to do so. And if I did, I still was going to use the same cloud providers this team is routing through.
I just paid to host an instance to do my part to support the fediverse. If you are from the elest team jbenguira hit me up or maybe I’ll hit your lemmy to get some help. Having some issues getting my domain to work and want to make sure I’m doing it right.
Let me answer to this properly:
- We have interest in Open source in general, not only Fediverse even if we also support Mastodon and also soon KBIN and Pixelfed
- We contribute in code to some projects, and we also give back part of our revenues to open source authors partnering with us
- There is NO lock-in, at any time customers can download a full backup and run their stack anywhere else
- We (human support team) have no access to customers servers unless customers give us the permission and share access with us for investigation
ad 1. You seem to not have paid much attention to the fact that part of the audience you are talking to is leaving another company’s platform because of what is now called “enshittification”. Part of that includes targeted advertising. Why would a cooperative that is driven by such an interest trust your agency?
ad 2. Hope so that you are paying your contractors! ;-)
ad 3. I’ll take it. potentially.
ad 4. bruh!You can Relax knowing that we are taking care for you of install, configuration, encryption, backups, software updates, os upgrades, live monitoring, alerts, live migrations without downtime …
I can also relax as the NSA and certainly others too, keep backups of all my tracking.
Hey brave anonymous
ad1) We are not related to Reddit in anyway, we are open source lovers, no lock in, we want to create an ecosystem for open source authors … not another AWS …
ad2) Of course we do! Why do you always guess the worst?
ad3) Potentially? what do you mean? https://docs.elest.io/books/backups/page/overview We have several ways of doing and downloading full backups including the data and the software stack to be run anywhere else …
Finally, all backups are encrypted, so not sure about NSA or anything else …
Question for you: are you taking your pills as prescribed by your doctor? :)
Question for you: are you taking your pills as prescribed by your doctor? :)
What an honest answer. Nice and educated.
Happy that you like it :)
Neat. Just out of curiosity, you actually bill 1¢ (ish) per hour?
Yes that’s correct, with our smallest plan, price is ~0.01 per hour, it’s deducted every hour from the credits balance (or free credits when you are in trial)
What kind of payment options do you provide? All the managed Lemmy instances I’ve found so far seem to be credit card (or crypto) only, which would be a hassle for me. In The Netherlands, iDEAL is used for most online transactions, and can be easily set up through through Stripe for example.
Either way, this is a great development, kudos to you! :)
We do use Stripe! I’ve just checked iDEAL require the transaction to be in EUR (make sense), and currently we bill only in USD, I’ll check with our team if we can add option to add balance credits in EUR :)
Nice! :D
As a side note: do your instances work when you put Cloudflare in proxy mode in front of it? At my current provider that breaks, but I’m not sure if that’s due to their implementation, or inherit to the software.
Yes we do have specific instructions to make it work with Cloudflare reverse proxy (orange cloud) https://docs.elest.io/books/security/page/custom-domain-and-automated-encryption-ssltls
Looking great! Bookmarking this for when I want to go live with my project.
Nice!
Thanks for all the hardwork!
Timely! Are you planning on doing kbin as well?
Yes!!! KBIN should be ready this week (maybe today or tomorrow)
Hah! Called it.
I’m waiting for the personal version, self-host your Lemmy experience for 2€ a month. Although maybe that would cause some issues with getting federated? Would any instances you want to look at have to accept you?
Nope. You would just have to subscribe to each community you want before it can hit your All feed. Communities don’t get pulled in until at least 1 person on the instance subscribes.
Good to know. In that case I can really see a case for a super dumbed down version of this aimed at individuals like myself that wouldn’t mind self hosting but can’t be bothered figuring it out.
Yeah, If its just me on my own instance i would only have to run it when im actually using lemmy. Saving energy on my own, and bandwidth and load on other instances maybe?
No comments specifically, just saying this looks really promising! Kudos
Are you aware that your instance is currently home to nearly 20,000 users, while still only reporting just 2 posts? From the outside looking in your instance looks like the current home of a spam bot farm waiting to happen.
Most of those users seem to have joined in the past 2 days. https://fedidb.org/network/instance/lemmy.elest.io
I thought it was just a loooot of new users, thanks for telling me
Yeah looks like a lot of single-user instances have seen a similar huge surge in user accounts. Here is a link to one of the discussions on the topic: https://lemm.ee/post/177673
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We are noot a coop but several employees have shares of the company :)
Our own infrastructure is deployed in Germany with Hetzner, providing 100% carbon dioxide-free More details about that here: https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/umweltschutz/
We plan to display carbon footprint when you select a provider / region / VM size, we are gathering the data currently
nice, thank you for this!
