Hi, I’m new with self-hosting but managed to set up my own Lemmy and Mastodon instances on a VPS recently. However, I ran into an issue with disk space quite rapidly (which I had way too few, because I started with the cheapest, smallest package for my VPS).

Now I prepare a new setup, where I’ll be able to dynamically scale disk space as needed, but this can get expensive quickly. Therefor my question: How much disk space do I typically need for private (1-3 user) instances of Lemmy and Mastodon? Are there settings, where I can limit the disk space utilization (at the cost of older stored content being overwritten)?

I would be fine with needing up to like 30-40 GB, but any more than that would be getting kinda expensive …

  • hitagiA
    1·
    1 year ago

    How much disk space do I typically need for private (1-3 user) instances of Lemmy and Mastodon?

    It’s hard to tell. My instance is only 9 days old and Lemmy takes up 450 MB of space right now. We’re also only about three users at the moment. Another instance, lemmy.click, is shutting down soon because of storage concerns. Their VPS has 25GB of storage and their disk usage is 75% with 90 users, 70 posts, and nearly 600 comments as of now.

    Are there settings, where I can limit the disk space utilization (at the cost of older stored content being overwritten)?

    I’m not aware of an option like this but you could save some space if you use WEBP for images and scale them down. That’s what I’m doing and pictrs uses 200 MB in my instance right now.