I just started renting a basic VPS through Racknerd with the intent to use it as a reverse proxy to point friends to my game server instances running at home without exposing my public IP. I could not figure out how to get it to work so I gave up after days of trying and am now using playit.gg. I prepaid for a year of the VPS. What cool project should I try on it now?
You can set up a mail server. You can set up something like Nextcloud. You can set up a personal website, or just run a webserver and turn it into a place to dump files. You can set up something like Syncthing to facilitate sharing files between your devices. You can set up some types of Federated services, but in my experience Mastodon is too heavy for a baseline VPS. I needed to augment my instance with additional memory, CPUs, and an S3-compatible object storage provider for about 600GB of user media. Lemmy might work, but I haven’t tried running it on a VPS on the open Internet yet.
Whatever you do with your server, you don’t want to run a mail server. Seriously, running your own mail server is such a pain. Just not worth it.
Yeah, it’s the fastest way to ensure no one sees your emails.
600GB of media? How many users did you have? Or does Mastodon cache media from other instances on your own?
Not many. Around 100. It does cache media from other instances for a period of 7 days though. This is adjustable, but even if you cut the caching down to one or two days, it will be more than a baseline VPS can handle. At my host, they start at 40GB and by the time you get to my storage needs, a much pricier dedicated server is required. Instead, I offloaded the storage to another provider and have nginx keep a much smaller 48 hour cache of media that actually gets requested by users on the VPS itself.
Interesting. I think Lemmy only caches thumbnails, but it pulls images from the instance that the post/comment is from.
Yeah there are basically trade-offs that need to be decided. You shouldn’t need a server farm to start a new small instance, but on the other hand, if everything gets hotlinked from the big instances that can also lead to problems. It also means that when the large instance begins suffering from performance problems or downtime, it directly impacts other instances with broken images and stuff.
I think part of the design decision made by Mastodon was to make it so users don’t have to send any requests to third party instances, which may or may not be operated with malicious intent (I’m not 100% sure on this, though). There are alternative projects like Pleroma and Misskey which provide a very similar federated microblogging format but aren’t as heavy to operate.
Nextcloud ran like garbage on my server that has better hardware than the VPS. I love the concept of it though and I would really like if the guy working on Memories could split that out from under NC.
I’ve found that GoToSocial and Calckey both use a lot less in resources than Mastodon does.
Akkoma is also much lighter on resources than Mastodon is.