For folks who have set up their own Mastodon servers, how are you finding it to maintain? What are ballpark costs? To be clear, I'm thinking about a server with one user, me. Would the DigitalOcean one-click Droplet be enough, or is that really just a demo?

I'm interested in controlling my own data and not having to worry about ever migrating to another instance (not that that's really a concern right now).

Follow up question, what's the most common URL/subdomain strategy if you want to self-host your own additional federated services such as Pixelfed and Peertube. I'm guessing service.domain for each (e.g., mastodon.example.social), but maybe I'm missing something there, so why not ask you all, right?

@wadethemaker The costs will probablly depend (at least to some extent) on which flavour of Fedi-software you run. Apparently, Mastodon is a bit of a beast and will need a bit more RAM (and possibly CPU) power.

I ran several different Fedi-flavours (but not Mastodon) because of the above. Based on personal experience, what I can tell you is that GoToSocial will run fine on the lowest end DigitalOcean VPS which I think costs $5 or $10 a month?

However (at least at the time I tried) GotoSocial was missing a few features that I wanted and so I switched to Akkoma, which has all the features I wanted (and a few more besides). It probably needs about 2GB of RAM to be comfortable. I found a server with Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com/) which gave me a 4GB RAM VPS for under/around $10 a month. I’ve been hosted there for a couple of months now and happy with things — both their server and Akkoma.