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Dendrobatus Azureus » 🌐 2026-01-12 / 2026-01-12
@dendrobatus_azureus@flipping.rocks

Having redundancy is important on many levels.

If we specifically look at the FediVerse, all of us need to realize the following:

* There is no cloud it is somebody else's computer.
* Having that server online costs money.
* cash is deliberately kept scarce by those in power.

At the end of December 2025 I received a dreadful message from the maintainer of a FediVerse server owner. It is the second of such dreadful messages. The owner had to shut down the server because the costs to keep it online where unbearable.

This particular case jumped out because the costs were about two and a half thousand dollars per month!

I immediately ask myself what kind of configuration was run, in order to justify that heavy amount of money to run the server. USD 2500 is on the amount of a monthly salary of skillful people living in highly developed countries.
In my country people have to make do with pennies in comparison for a full month's work

I have an internet friend who runs FediVerse servers setups, using freeBSD tools on VMs which cost him just EUR 4 a month per VM. If those two people had only met at the time that the second one was creating a server he would have stayed online for years, with just one month of his spending; 625 months to be exact. Per year that would be 7500 months which would be 625 years much longer than the lifespan of all of us reading this.

Alas they've had no contact and another one bit the dust.

All of us who are users on different servers, need to realize that somebody is always paying the bill

It can vary from just EUR 4 but can even climb to astronomical levels of USD two and a half thousand as I learned then.

I'm fortunate enough that I'm from a period where everything needed to be done from scratch

I'm one of the three persons who set up the foundation of the internet in my country. Back then we had a 9600 BPS fax modem from the brand of Telebit donated by the OAS. Linux did not exist. We used waffle as our BBS front end on a single tasking os.

When you wanted to fetch an image you had to go through Archie for search, FTPmail at decwrl.dec.com, to transfer the file, learn scripting languages, before you could get one image from nasa.gov.

You had to Binary convert and uuencode the jpeg file hack it into 64kB pieces, and revert the process at arrival, before you could see it.

All connections were once a week where you needed to dial internationally to upr2.clu.net which cost a hefty amount of money almost bankrupting the director of the University computer center who initially payed out of pocket.

I know how much the internet can cost when you need to run a server.

Always be thankful and grateful when you're allowed to work on someone else's computer on the internet

Realize that on walled Gardens you pay with your data, personal uniquely identifiable data. Walled Gardens sell your data for about USD 4000 a person.

Make accounts on different FediVerse servers so that you are not cut off, when one bites the dust.

Use your own offline storage for your important documents toots.

Used triple tier backup systems.

Remember that someone always pays a bill for whatever you do on the internet.

#FediVerse #programming #technology #OpenSource #redundancy #backup