I have an Oracle Always Free VPS. 4 ARM Ampere A1 vCPUs, 24GB RAM, 200GB storage. Will this be a good fit as a server for a Lemmy instance? Are there any issues with hosting Lemmy on aarch64?

  • ppp@lemmy.oneEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Oracle has a tendency to pull the rug and take your VPS away. You can read about it on the forums or on r/oraclecloud. I still have mine but I’ve heard of so many stories about how Oracle will flat out just terminate your instance without warning.

    If you want to push through with it, make sure to do regular backups (as everyone should do).

  • I eat words@group.ltEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    it works fine, depending on popularity of your instance - you might have to add more resources in the future.

    as for aarch64 - there are docker images available for lemmy and lemmy-ui

    • neoney@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Thanks, I’ll hope to not use docker though - planning to run NixOS, which has a module for it.

      Just double checked, the nixpkgs for lemmy-ui and lemmy-server have aarch64-linux support B)

      • I eat words@group.ltEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        i have not used NixOS yet, not sure how easy to setup it on Oracle OCI, but i guess you will do fine ;)

        • neoney@lemmy.neoney.devEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          You were right :) look at my username! Installation was very interesting - using kexec to swap the current loaded kernel to a NixOS live image, and installing it right over the current system surprisingly worked flawlessly. One reboot for an entire install (I might end up writing a post in [email protected] about it).

          Setting up lemmy was a bit more difficult though, as the lemmy module is currently in the middle of a pull request to improve it, so I had to do some hacky trickery.

  • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.comEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Well, do just note- hosting an instance doesn’t directly help offset the load of this one-

    I had an extra server laying around, 32 cores, 64 threads, 256G of DDR-4, and figured I would host and instance to help offset some load, and support this movement. And- that is how https://lemmyworld.com/ was born.

    HOWEVER, as most of the communities were created on lemmy.world. most of the load will stay on lemmy.world. All of this hardware will only get leveraged if/when somebody decides to create a popular community on here.

    So, that being said, you can. But, be aware of how lemmy/mastadon/etc is setup.

    • neoney@lemmy.neoney.devEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’m aware, thanks

      Ended up creating an instance just for me, my main reasons were:

      • not scared of instance shutting down and me losing my data - if I do, that’s on me
      • can block federation to an entire instance if I really don’t like some people
      • cool username
      • I don’t really get lag - if other instances are overloaded they work slowly, mine will work fine. Content from the slow ones will be slow, but the homepage will be better
      • I can make myself a community and use it as a blog

      I probably forgot about something too…