Hey, yeah I actually was going to see if I could post the full setup and cost on this later, but since you're asking now I'll just go ahead and post it here!
The domain - programming.dev - cost $560 or something like that for the first year, then it's $427 for every year after.
The lemmy instance is running on a Vultr High Frequency instance at the lowest tier. I thought I could up it if we started getting high traffic, but expect the server to run just fine for quite a number of users. I do think I might have to move postgres off to its own dedicated instance, but haven't really thought too much about that yet.
I think bandwidth is actually going to be the biggest issue, because if we federate with other massive instances then even if there is only a small number of users, we're pulling in all the traffic from the other instances. I can definitely understand only allowing a few instances, but not sure I'm going to restrict that just yet. If people can donate then that shouldn't be a problem.
The email is all running through SendGrid. I was going to use Mailgun, but Sendgrid is a bit easier to use and has a lot higher cap, and I expected to get to that in time.
Currently SG costs nothing, but I expect it to cost $35 a month after my trial runs out...
Does that pull all traffic from that instance, or only traffic related to the specific communities from those instances that people have subscribed to?
Seems like a good opportunity for improvement if it’s the former.