after some extended downtime, I rolled out the following changes to our instance:
- pict-rs was migrated to version 0.4 then 0.5. this should hopefully fix an issue where pict-rs kept leaking TCP sockets and exhausting its resources, leading to our image uploads and downloads becoming non-functional. let me know if you run into any issues along those lines!
- NixOS was updated to 24.11.
- the instance's storage was expanded by 100GB. this increased the monthly bill for our instance by €1.78 per month. to keep the bill low, I disabled an automated backup feature that became unnecessary when we started doing Restic backups.
I have one more thing I want to implement before our big Lemmy upgrade; I expect I should be able to fit it in tomorrow. I'll update this thread with details when I start on it.
of course! I figure being transparent about costs is a good way to keep them low; it’s very easy to overprovision infrastructure and pay a lot for it, and I’ve seen instance admins fall into that trap before. being open about costs gives me a strong incentive to plan ahead and find ways to keep them as low as possible. also, like David said, awful.systems might end up accepting donations one day, and doing so wouldn’t sit right with me if the money were going to waste.
currently I think we’re around €30/month for hosting, plus a tiny monthly fee for object storage and email. I don’t have a monthly estimate for domain name fees, but I should calculate it one day.