I’m pretty new to the fediverse, and I find the idea amazing. But one thing concerns me though. How will server owners be able to afford to run servers with massive amounts of data coming through them? Theoretically speaking, if a Reddit migration were to happen how would server upkeep costs look like?

  • s38b35M5@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    reddit costs about $0.12 per active user per month to operate, times about 4 million active users in any given month equals a little under $500k per month in hosting costs

    These figures… Where did you come by them? I recognize the $0.12 estimate from Apollo’s dev, Christian Selig (u/iamthatis) breaking down what he thought was /r/ income per user per month, not cost.

    So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active users, that’s $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly.

    As other lemmy admins have mentioned, for US$0.01/month/user, all costs would be covered handily (so far at least).

    Edit: added quote from Christian

    • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Hm… I think my numbers are wrong. My source was the following fairly unreliable numbers filtered through my imperfect memory:

      • Christian’s post for the $0.12 per user per month, misremembering it as hosting costs
      • This post where one random person does some dodgy math to arrive at $5.8 million per year hosting costs, divided by 12 is $483k. This is all as of 9 years ago.
      • 4 million users from $483k divided by 0.12

      So, I think my math is wrong. As you noted, the 4 million users per month is probably too low by 1-2 orders of magnitude in the present day (although I feel like “active users per month” probably has a fairly imprecise definition). Do you happen to know what are accurate numbers? I’d be pretty interested in knowing what are the actual numbers for reddit’s hosting costs / active users / cost per user, since obviously mine are wrong. 🙂

      As other lemmy admins have mentioned, for US$0.01/month/user, all costs would be covered handily (so far at least).

      Is this true? Ruud’s numbers were €532 for hosting costs in May, and 8,000 users as of mid-June after a bunch of growth – so wouldn’t that add up to around $0.10 per user? Or were there economies of scale as he moved up to his higher server tier? (Edit: April and May were only Mastadon, no Lemmy. Obviously I cannot reading-comprehension today, I give up on numbers for now)