How I set up a social media site from an iPad for $50 a month without managing servers.

The Pledge

Over the last month I’ve set up a Mastodon compatible service for about $50 per month without a single server to manage.

The easiest solution is a hosted solution. There are several decent hosting providers out there. Check out Join Mastodon’s list, not all of them are the same. They start out at well under our price but a few of them cap out at nearly double our target. Several of them are limited to Europe or their websites are entirely in Japanese, which for my monoglot self is a non-starter.

I don’t know how things at nerdfight.online will scale and how soon I’d go from starter tier to “call us for a quote”. I also wanted direct access to the codebase, or at least the database for some of the features I’m planning on. So I decided to host my own.

Most people who choose to host their own use a VPS or server of some kind. Hachyderm.io for example is famously hosted on a rack in Nova’s house, and Digital Ocean has a one click startup service. For reasons I talked about three years ago and because when it comes to systems work I have the attention span of an autist with ADHD (hello late diagnosis), I wanted something serverless.

Since that post last three years ago I’ve found render.com. I really like how quickly and easily it is to set up something and get it onto the web. This isn’t paid advertising for them, but as of right now I’m very happy with what they’ve provided.

I’ll save you the month or so of reading, testing, throwing away, and restarting effort I went through and just describe the fastest way, in my opinion, to get started with a setup like mine.

Before we start I should stress that setting up a website that publishes user generated content is much more complicated than the technical infrastructure. Denise at dreamwidth has a really good post just covering the bare basics of what’s necessary. Suffice to say if you’re planning on going past a single user, you will need to do some research and probably have a lawyer you feel comfortable calling if you get into trouble.

I’ve spent a decade running my little company, my risk tolerances are different than someone else. I’m fully aware there’s a lot I don’t know that could potentially make my life harder, and I have a lot of privilege I can lean on. I’m still being very cautious as I move forward.

If you’re just wanting a single user instance, well you’re the only one who can get yourself into trouble. Things should be moderately okay, but forewarned is forearmed.

The Turn

What you’ll need

* 1 device with a web browser and internet access

Instructions

First Register a domain name. Render has instructions specifically for namecheap they also have instructions for cloudflare. I use namecheap for this because I’ve been using them for years already. You can follow Render’s instructions configuring the domain name.

Next on GitHub we’re going to create new repo to hold your instance’s configurations and files. We’ll be using one of the templates I’ve set up to make things easier.

I tried GoToSocial (template) first. The documentation says that it’s in an alpha state, and the documentation is not wrong, but it’s a very solid alpha. If I were planning on staying a single user instance I might have stayed with GoToSocial. I was able to use the starter size service for both the web service and database with GoToSocial without issue, keeping my costs to around $14 per month.

Having run up against GoToSocial’s edges a few too many times, I switched to Akkoma (template). It had a similar reputation for minimal resource consumption. Once I’d gotten myself set up and followed a couple hundred accounts, I started bumping up against the half gig limit of the starter level. Upgrading the database and the web services to standard fixed that issue and I haven’t encountered anything like it again since.

We will be focusing on Akkoma, if you want to go with GoToSocial the steps are similar but not identical. You’re welcome to reach out to me for help.

Clone the template repository. You can do this from the browser by just clicking Use this Template and selecting Create a new repository. When it asks, name your repository after the domain name you picked in step one. After you have forked the template you’ll need to edit a few files, you can click the file and then the pencil icon to open it in an editor in the browser.

Edit the render.yaml file and change the domain akkoma.example.com to your own domain. You only need to change it in domains: and the DOMAIN environment variable, but I recommend changing it everywhere, including the place like the name db.example.com. This way everything is grouped together in the Render dashboard. You’ll also want to change the repo: to the URL for your GitHub repo.

Save and commit the changes to render.yaml and make sure they’re pushed to the GitHub repo. If you’re editing in the browser this is all one step. Now we will tell Render about our repository.

Sign up for an account with render.com. If you use GitHub authentication it will automatically associate your Render account with your GitHub account and make the next steps easier. Click on Blueprints at the top of the dashboard and click New Blueprint Instance. Connect to the GitHub repository you created in the previous steps.

Render will take a few minutes to parse the render.yaml file and create the services that host your instance. After a few minutes you can check the dashboard, everything should be deployed. You’ll need to manually create your first user before you can log in.

On the dashboard click on the your akkoma service, mine is named ack.nerdfight.online. Click the Shell tab on the left side. This will bring up a window that allows you type directly into the docker container’s command prompt. Type the following, be sure to replace USER with the username you prefer and email@exmample.com with your email address:

  cd /opt/akkoma
  bin/pleroma_ctl user new USER email@example.com --admin

Now you should be able to go to the domain you’ve configured in your browser and log in. You can Toot your success.

For nerdfight.online I’ve also configured S3 media storage and a static site for documentation. Check the configuration for nerdfight.online or reach out to me if you’d like to see how either of these work.

In the future I would like to expand things a few ways. Eventually I suspect I’ll want to add a CDN for static assets, and a dedicated search engine to improve the speed of everything. I also have a hand full of custom services I’d like to install, like a nightly digest and the Fake Nerd Fight Friday script.

The Prestige

What about price? How does it compare for the all-in-one hosted solutions? Pretty well I think. In theory you could stand up a server for free … but it wouldn’t really be very useful. Render’s free tier Postgres service is automatically suspended after 90 days, they give you 14 days after that to take a backup before deleted the service. They allow you to create a new free tier database so in theory you could restore from the backups every 90 days … but while testing your backups is important, building your entire app around it every three months seems suboptimal.

I paid $20.17 for December and I’m currently projected to spend $37.72 for January. I expect my costs to level out around $40 - $50 per month, but I’m still in the middle of testing. There isn’t a lot of hard data out there about scaling and prices, but I’m pretty sure that I’ll be able to hit a several dozen active users before I have to look at scaling up the services further.

Notice that because every website we’ve worked with here has a web based data entry, we never needed anything more than a web browser. You could easily deploy a new service from an iPad in the middle of the ocean. During initial testing I set up a second instance while debugging what turned out to be a firewall issue with on the cruise ship I was on. I had only taken my iPad with me.