well i certainly wasn't expecting 30 thousand users. the unfortunate part with pleroma, in specific its database is that it doesn't scale well at all. if you aren't actively maintaining it, your instance with only a handful of people will grind to a halt.

we started poast out on mastodon on a shitty 2c/2gb VPS in January 2021 and garnered 1000 users in only a handful of hours because some friends and i were advertising it on twitter. we outgrew what it was on the first day and ended up moving to a dedicated server that was 50$/mo for a few months. we got up to about 3000 users and outgrew that server (4c/8t 16GB shitty E3 Xeon from dedipath). during this time cloudflare also despite us paying monthly suspended CDN services for us and accused us of "abusing the free tier" so overnight one night poast had all of its images replaced with "User is abusing Cloudflare's Free Tier" or some shit image. so I had to build our own CDN. I started doing that in March of 2021 and had it deployed by the end of the month which initially cost us about 50$ per month but now accounts for a much larger amount. the majority of costs poast incurs is making sure we have the bandwidth we need tbh.

anyway, in march 2021 we moved from that shitty e3 to a dual xeon 24c/48t 64GB dedicated server from a company based in Texas called Spin Servers. this was fine until one day a switch in their backend disabled our 10G network because of a bandwidth overage despite us being unmetered and it happened on a day they decided to take siesta I guess -- wasnt a national holiday or anything but nobody at all was in the office. it was 11 hours before the owner of the company reached out to me to apologize but by then we had already made concessions to move.

at this point because the server was always taxed we decided it was time to split pleroma and the database server -- this is where the jump in cost came from as we were renting a partial rack at another datacenter and had several machines hosted there (still have one that's being used for revolver iirc)

i cut the cost down about 400$ from its peak of about 2400$/mo by switching to where our hardware is now but yeah. thats the history of poast and why it costs so much. tldr multiple servers powering the backend and having to run our own CDN. using something like bunny.net for CDN our costs would be ~4-5k/mo alone