I started looking into the Fediverse early this year and realized it is pretty much what I always wanted from social media: independent, self-contained nodes federating and talking across an open network.
If you are new to the Fediverse, these posts are great primers:
As a self-hosting enthusiast, I naturally wanted to spin up my own instance. I asked around on Mastodon about server costs, and the minimum ballpark came out to around $15/year for a cheap VPS plus domain fees. In the spirit of keeping costs down, I initially ran an instance inside my homelab instead of buying a VPS. It hummed along for six months, but had a few downtime spells (home power cuts, broadband hiccups, and mostly self-inflicted issues from my own network tinkering). Because Fediverse servers drop federated messages when down, I decided to migrate off my local machine and onto the cloud.
Mastodon is feature-packed but notoriously heavy on memory. I went with Pleroma instead—it is lightweight, easy on resources, and covers everything I need. By piecing together free tiers from different cloud providers, I got hosting costs down to $0, leaving only the annual domain registration fee. It has been running reliably for a full quarter now.
Here is the setup:
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Compute:
- Koyeb
- Northflank
- Zeabur (Originally had a free tier; now requires a paid plan for persistent deploys)
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Database:
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Media Storage:
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CDN & Edge:
Deployment guide and configuration templates:
A friendly reminder: “free” often ends up being the most expensive if things go wrong. Make sure you set up automated, off-site backups for both your PostgreSQL database and your media buckets.
Feel free to follow me across the Fediverse at @chi@miantiao.me.