General Technical Info
Many Mastodon servers use centralized hosting services like masto.host. These make life simple – you pay a flat fee and they take care of maintenance and scaling. There's nothing wrong with this approach, but it can get a little pricey if your community gets large.
We decided to roll our own, which gives a bit more flexibility at the expense of having to get a little bit more in the weeds technically.
Here's what we've got set up at the moment...
Hosting
Web Servers & Database
Our core infrastructure runs on Hetzner cloud at their East Coast facility located in Ashburn, VA. We're currently using a 4 core VM with 8GB of RAM and 160GB of local storage that costs €13.10/month.
This part of the stack serves the website and APIs, runs backend processes, and stores user account & posting data. We create a backup of everything on the server once a day and have the ability to rollback to any previous backup made within the last seven days if something goes wrong.
Media Storage
Profile pictures and other uploaded and cached media files are hosted at static.nc.social. This is an S3-compatible bucket at Wasabi located in the US on the east coast. We're currently paying for 1TB of storage for $5.99/month.
Other Sites
We maintain two other sites that aren't Mastodon services: status.nc.social and the site you're on right now, about.nc.social. The status site is hosted on Github pages and runs a free, open-source uptime checker called Upptime. This site is hosted for free on Vercel and is built with an open source docs tool called Docusaurus. The code for both of these sites is available on our Github.
Other Services
DNS
We use Cloudflare's free tier to manage DNS and provide an internet-scale cache in front of our core services. This significantly reduces bandwidth costs. Cloudflare also handles incoming email to the nc.social domain.
Email
We use Sendgrid to handle outgoing emails sent from the nc.social domain. Using a 3rd-party email provider means we don't have to worry as much about our emails getting caught up in people's spam folders (theoretically). We use their free tier, which allows 100 emails/day. This will likely be the next thing we'll have to start paying for if this community gets bigger. In the meantime, consider whether you really need email notifications turned on. 😎
Domain Registrar
This one is handled by Google Domains and costs $110/year.