As many of you will know, we have been borrowing server hosting, which kept costs very minimal. Many of you donated to the host (thanks!), but a while back they stopped taking donations as they wound down operations including transferring mastodon.nz to new people and gave me notice that we would eventually need to move to other hosting.

That was quite some time back, and now I've been notified that the time has finally come. At some point in this month we will swap over to a new host. It will also involve significantly increased costs to run the server (up from almost nothing), and most likely we will move to a VPS off of the current shared but dedicated hardware to more appropriate specs, and move to using object storage for images. All this will likely require some down time, which I will try to give notice of. I'm currently planning for this to be quite significant (perhaps done over the course of a whole weekend), since this would involve migrating all images to object storage which must be done with pict-rs shut down (others have reported 8+ hours for this), as well as transferring all other data to a new VPS, then a slow period of time as it catches up on federation. The second day would be a backup in case something went wrong.

When this move happens, I'll also start to do regular financial updates. In the past people have been interested in running costs, but they have been minimal out of pocket due to the server hosting being free to me. With the increased costs it makes sense to start regular updates about what it costs to run the instance, similar to what other instances do. There is a very wide range in what this could cost, and it's not clear right now what the lowest spec server is that we could get away with. But I am hoping we can keep this under $50 a month. People have asked previously about donations, a little while back I set up a page so you could donate directly to Lemmy.nz, here is the post about it (with the emphasis on not donating if it will materially impact you): https://lemmy.nz/post/21494039

Before moving forward, I'd like some input from Lemmy.nz users on some specific questions:

Currently we are hosted in NZ, how important is it to continue this? (with cost being the main barrier)

We will try to host in NZ if we can, but if cost becomes an issue, is it a big deal to host in Australia or elsewhere? We will want to try to stay close to NZ so NZ based users have low latency

Do people object to Cloudflare?

Currently we use Cloudflare, with benefits around loading faster for people in other countries (due to the CDN) and the ability to more easily handle AI scrapers.

Cloudflare puts us in the power of a large company and reduces our independence, but it also reduces bandwidth usage and have tools to more easily fight AI scrapers that cripple the server. Cloudflare offers captcha services that help this.

Remember, users on other instances that don't proxy images will also be loading images directly from our servers, which Cloudflare will reduce the latency of due to their CDN.

If people object to Cloudflare, I am willing to attempt to avoid using it, adding Anubus and managing IP blocklists, but it will be more work. It will also be a slightly higher cost, as we will need a higher traffic allocation since Cloudflare currently caches a lot of image traffic.

Pātai?

If you have any questions, let me know!